House - early medieval, Longstone, Co. Tipperary

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House

House – early medieval, Longstone, Co. Tipperary

In a flat field in the townland of Longstone, Co. Tipperary, the ground holds the outline of a dwelling that has not been occupied for roughly a thousand years.

What survives is a raised rectangular platform, just over ten and a half metres long and a little over four metres wide, still enclosed by a low earth-and-stone bank and a shallow outer fosse, the term for the ditch that would originally have helped define and defend the structure. Two gaps in the bank, set directly opposite each other at the north and south ends, mark what were probably the entrance points. It is a quiet, almost imperceptible feature in the landscape now, but its proportions and construction are legible enough to read.

The dwelling sits within the northern quadrant of a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. A second house footing lies just three metres to the south, suggesting this was a small domestic complex rather than a single isolated building. The wider landscape around it is notably dense with early and medieval remains: a castle site lies roughly 270 metres to the north, and a church with an associated graveyard sits about 195 metres to the south-west. A 1640 Civil Survey entry for the lands of Kilcornan records an "old castle irrepairable and some cabbins wast," a phrase that might conceivably refer to the structures within this ringfort, though it could equally describe a castle elsewhere in the townland that has since been lost. What can be said with reasonable confidence is that the footings here are domestic in character, the remains of ordinary buildings rather than any fortified structure.

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Pete F
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