At Crockacullion in County Sligo, a ruined rectangular house sits wedged into the space between the south-east walls of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone enclosure typically built as a defended farmstead. The house is modest in its dimensions, roughly 8.8 metres east to west and 3.5 metres north to south, and is divided into three rooms. What makes it quietly odd is the detail of its interior: wall cupboards carved into the thickness of the stone walls, a window and doorway facing south, and no fireplace anywhere evident. People lived here, stored things here, and yet apparently did not heat the place in any conventional way, or at least no trace of a hearth survives.

The house did not stand alone. A second structure of similar size, though irregular in plan, sits a few metres to the west, and the cashel walls themselves appear to have been modified and subdivided as part of the same settlement activity. Further upslope to the south-east, around 300 to 400 metres away on a terrace, lie the ruins of another small settlement of two houses. The 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a pattern of subrectangular fields connecting the two sites, laid out on a north-east to south-west axis and enclosed by drystone walls between 0.8 and 1 metre wide. Those walls follow the grain of the land, bending around bedrock terraces and natural scarps rather than imposing a rigid geometry on the hillside. The overall picture is of a community that worked the ground carefully and pragmatically, reusing ancient stonework where it was available and shaping their fields around what the rock allowed.