House - 18th/19th century, Fanygalvan, Co. Clare

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House

House – 18th/19th century, Fanygalvan, Co. Clare

What survives at Fanygalvan in County Clare is small enough to overlook entirely, a low scatter of stone at the foot of a south-facing slope where the ground levels out and the views close in.

Yet the walls of this two-roomed house still stand in places to between 1.2 and 1.6 metres, the double-faced stonework holding its shape after the better part of two centuries.

The structure dates to the 18th or 19th century and was recorded as occupied on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, meaning a household was living here during the years leading into the Famine. When the building was inspected in 1998, surveyors found it aligned east to west and divided into two rooms of noticeably different proportions. The western room measures roughly 3.4 metres north to south and 5.5 metres east to west; the eastern room is 4.4 metres by 4 metres. The walls are approximately 0.6 metres thick. One detail stands out as quietly telling: each room has its own separate entrance cut into the southern wall, and there is no connecting doorway between them. Whether this reflects two households sharing a structure, a working arrangement between domestic and agricultural functions, or something else entirely, the building itself does not say. The southern wall has been reduced to its foundations, which is why the entrances survive only as gaps rather than as standing opes. The remaining three walls hold considerably better.

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Pete F
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