House - indeterminate date, Castlenode, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
House
In a field at Castlenode in County Roscommon, a low rectangle of grass-covered stone traces the outline of a building that no longer has a name, an owner, or a date.
The walls survive only as a kind of memory in the earth, rising no more than twenty centimetres above the surrounding ground, their width between half a metre and seventy centimetres. The interior measures roughly eleven metres along its longer axis and three and a half metres across, dimensions that suggest a modest domestic structure, long and narrow in the manner common to rural Irish vernacular building across many centuries. What period it belongs to remains genuinely unknown.
The remains sit at the bottom of a north-facing slope, about fifty metres south-east of a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically used as a defended farmstead. The proximity of the two features is suggestive. Houses and ancillary structures were often built in the immediate vicinity of raths, either as part of the original settlement or as later additions that made use of the same sheltered ground. Whether this building was contemporary with the rath, or came considerably later, the physical evidence no longer says. Grass has covered everything, softening the stonework into the landscape until the outline is visible mainly as a slight change in texture and level rather than any dramatic relief.
