House - indeterminate date, Bohateh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
House
In the townland of Bohateh, in County Clare, there is a house that nobody can quite date.
It sits in the archaeological record under the careful but uncommitted label of "indeterminate date", a designation that is less an admission of failure than an honest acknowledgement that some structures resist easy classification. Stone walls can be medieval or early modern or nineteenth century, and without excavation, documentary evidence, or distinctive architectural features, a building can remain stubbornly ambiguous.
Bohateh is a small rural townland in Clare, a county whose landscape is dense with survivals of one kind or another, from early Christian enclosures to post-medieval farmsteads abandoned during or after the Famine years. A structure recorded simply as a house, without a date range attached, could belong to almost any period of continuous habitation in the region. The absence of a fixed date does not make it less significant; it simply means the building has not yet given up what it knows.