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

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House

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

On a north-facing slope at Caherblonick in County Clare, the grass-covered walls of a three-roomed house sit low against the ground, their stonework reduced to little more than half a metre in height but still legible enough to read as a domestic space.

The structure runs east to west, stretching nearly twenty-five metres in length, and its walls survive best at the eastern end. The central room, a little over three metres wide, may originally have served as an entrance hall, which would place the living and working spaces to either side, a sensible arrangement for a rural household.

When the site was inspected in 1998, it was judged to date from the 18th or 19th century, placing it within a period of considerable pressure on the Irish rural landscape, when smallholdings multiplied and contracted across the west of the country. What makes this particular ruin more than a solitary footnote is its relationship to two other houses lying roughly fifteen metres to the west. The three structures appear to have been arranged around a square, suggesting some degree of coordinated settlement rather than isolated habitation. Fifteen metres to the east stands a cashel, a type of early stone-walled enclosure typically associated with earlier medieval or early Christian occupation, which raises the possibility that this later cluster of houses was built in close proximity to, and perhaps with awareness of, an older landmark already embedded in the landscape.

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Pete F
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