House - indeterminate date, Clerhaun, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Clerhaun, Co. Galway

On the north-western slope of a ridge in Clerhaun, County Galway, the remains of a house survive in a form that is more suggestion than structure.

What the ground holds is less a ruin than a trace: a double drystone wall, roughly 0.95 metres wide, curving from west-north-west through north to north-east. Drystone construction, as the name implies, uses no mortar, the stones relying on their own weight and careful placement for stability. Here, even that skeletal form is only partially legible, defined by foundation stones set on edge with a rubble core between them. Beyond that arc, the monument is completely overgrown.

The house sits about 30 metres to the north-east of a separate enclosed site, and the two were likely part of the same agricultural or domestic landscape, though the relationship between them is not fully understood. No date has been established for the structure; it is recorded simply as indeterminate. That ambiguity is not unusual in rural Connacht, where drystone buildings of various periods were built, abandoned, rebuilt, and absorbed back into the land in cycles that resist neat chronology. The Clerhaun house may be medieval, early modern, or later; the surviving fabric does not say.

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