House - indeterminate date, Westquarter, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Westquarter, Co. Galway

On a coastal promontory somewhere in Westquarter, Co. Galway, a cluster of ancient circular huts once occupied the interior of a promontory fort, one of those defensive enclosures where a headland's natural geography did much of the work, with a man-made rampart or bank cutting across the neck of land to complete the barrier.

What survives of the huts today amounts to little more than faint ground-level traces, the kind of thing that rewards patient looking but offers nothing dramatic to the casual eye.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the site in 1911 and described six huts arranged in three distinct groups. Towards the southern end of the fort interior sat two conjoined huts, with internal diameters of roughly 5.5 metres and 3.6 metres, accompanied by a smaller circular annex of about 4.57 metres. Further north, two more conjoined huts of approximately 4.57 metres and 5.48 metres in diameter formed a second cluster, and at the northern end a single circular hut of around 4.57 metres stood alone. Westropp returned to the subject in 1914, by which point the picture he painted was already one of a site in decline. Conjoined huts of this kind, where two or more stone-walled roundhouses share a wall or open directly into one another, are a recurring feature of Early Medieval and Iron Age Atlantic Ireland, though without datable finds or further excavation it is impossible to assign these particular structures to any specific period, which is why they carry the unsatisfying but honest label of indeterminate date.

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Pete F
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