House - indeterminate date, Aghaboy, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
House
Tucked into the south-eastern corner of an ancient enclosure in Aghaboy, County Longford, a rectangular outline in the grass marks the ghost of a building whose age nobody has been able to pin down.
The foundation courses of its stone walls survive just about above ground level, rising no more than twenty to thirty centimetres, yet they are substantial enough to reveal a structure that was once fifteen and a half metres long from east to west and five and a half metres wide, with walls nearly two metres thick. That combination of modest height and considerable wall thickness is all that remains to speak for whatever life was once conducted inside.
The building sits within a larger enclosure, the two forming a relationship that is fairly common in the Irish landscape, where a house or ancillary structure occupies one quadrant of a defined space, often for reasons of shelter or organisation. Enclosures of this kind range enormously in date and function, from early medieval ringforts to later farmstead boundaries, and without excavation or datable finds it is impossible to say where this example falls on that spectrum. The walls are now grassed over, their stonework locked beneath turf, which is itself part of why the site resists easy dating. What can be said is that the proportions suggest a building of some substance rather than a simple outhouse or animal pen, though its precise purpose remains as indeterminate as its date.