House - medieval, Coolmore, Co. Tipperary

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House

House – medieval, Coolmore, Co. Tipperary

In a rough pasture in County Tipperary, on a low natural rise surrounded by wet, rushy ground, the wall-footings of a medieval building sit quietly within the enclosure of a moated site.

Moated sites were a common feature of the medieval Irish landscape, typically consisting of a rectangular or oval area enclosed by a water-filled ditch, and were used as defended farmsteads or manorial centres, often associated with Anglo-Norman settlement from the twelfth century onwards. What makes this particular interior worth pausing over is not just its age but its layout: the footings of at least three separate buildings survive within the enclosure, suggesting something more than a single-family arrangement.

The building in the southern part of the enclosure measures approximately 7.3 metres by 12.8 metres and is aligned east to west. Off its northern wall there projects what appears to be a T-plan extension, roughly 3.1 metres by 4.2 metres, a detail that hints at a more considered domestic or functional arrangement than a simple rectangular shell would suggest. An entrance, around 1.9 metres wide, opens roughly midway along the southern wall. Two further building footings survive elsewhere in the interior, and if they are all of the same period as the moated enclosure itself, all three structures would date to the medieval era. The conditional phrasing matters here: wall-footings of this kind are difficult to date precisely without excavation, and the relationship between the buildings and the enclosure remains an open question.

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Pete F
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