House - indeterminate date, Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare

On the limestone plateau of the Burren in County Clare, two walls are just about all that remain of a rectangular house whose age nobody can pin down.

No date, no builder, no record of who last slept under whatever roof once spanned those stones. What survives is the northwest wall and the northeast wall, each roughly 0.9 metres thick and built in drystone construction, meaning no mortar, just carefully fitted stone against stone. The interior measures at least 5.2 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 3.1 metres across. Set into the inner face of the northwest wall, at its eastern end, is a single large upright slab, one metre high and nearly as wide, which sits there with a quiet deliberateness that suggests it was placed with some purpose, though what that purpose was is no longer readable.

The house sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the enclosures, walls, and divisions of land surrounding it were laid down and modified across several different eras, layer upon layer of agricultural organisation going back potentially thousands of years. The Burren, with its exposed karst limestone and thin soils, has preserved these ancient landscapes unusually well precisely because later intensive farming never buried or erased them. This particular house is not alone on the plateau; a second structure of similarly uncertain date stands around 29 metres to the southwest, and roughly 26 metres to the south there is what appears to have been a paddock or corral, a small enclosure likely used to contain livestock. Together the two houses and the corral suggest something like a small agricultural settlement, though whether they were occupied simultaneously or represent different phases of use across centuries is unknown. The wide views in all directions from this spot would have made it a practical place to watch over animals and land, even if the exposure to Atlantic weather must have made it a demanding one.

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Pete F
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