House - 18th/19th century, Caherweelder, Co. Galway

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House

House – 18th/19th century, Caherweelder, Co. Galway

A scatter of eight roofless houses sits quietly in the scrubland east of Caherweelder in County Galway, their walls reduced to low, overgrown banks barely visible above the vegetation.

What makes this cluster quietly unusual is not any single dramatic feature but the absence of one: there is no discernible pattern to how the buildings were laid out or oriented. They are not arranged in a row, not aligned to any track or field boundary, not gathered around a central space. They simply sit dispersed across a roughly oval area of about 170 metres east to west by 130 metres north to south, as if each household had claimed its own piece of ground with little reference to its neighbours.

McCaffrey, writing in 1952, recorded six enclosures, house sites, and old walls in the field immediately east of the nearby cashel, a cashel being a stone-walled early medieval ringfort of the kind common across the west of Ireland. By the time a ground inspection was carried out, eight houses had been identified rather than six. Their construction follows a vernacular pattern of the 18th and 19th centuries: double-faced stone walls with a rubble core, each wall around 0.7 metres thick, the buildings averaging roughly 10.5 metres in length and 6.2 metres in width. The associated enclosures, which would have served as small yards or animal pens, are either rectangular or circular in plan. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map does not mark them at all, suggesting they may have been abandoned or overlooked by that date, and by the 1933 edition they are already shown as unroofed structures, open to the sky and beginning their slow return to ground level.

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Pete F
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