House - indeterminate date, Oldgrange, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
House
Tucked against the inner edge of an earthwork in Oldgrange, County Sligo, is the ghostly outline of a small rectangular building whose age nobody has been able to pin down.
It measures roughly 5.6 metres on its longer axis and 4 metres across, and three of its four walls survive only as a low, fragmentary bank of earth and stone, no more than 30 centimetres high in places and less than a metre wide. The fourth side is formed by the bank of the enclosure itself, as though whoever built here simply borrowed that existing boundary and walled in the remaining three sides to complete a room.
The enclosure it sits within is classified as a possible ringwork, a type of defensive or enclosed settlement more common in medieval contexts than in the earlier prehistoric period, typically consisting of a raised bank and sometimes a ditch arranged in a roughly circular plan. The relationship between the house site and the ringwork is not fully understood, and no date has been firmly established for either. What is clear is that someone once decided this sheltered corner, pressed against the interior of an earthen bank in the east-south-east of the enclosure, was a practical place to build. The dimensions are modest, consistent with a single small domestic room or ancillary structure, and the way it projects inward from the main bank suggests a deliberate use of existing earthworks for shelter or structural economy.