Architectural fragment, Cappagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Architectural fragment, Cappagh, Co. Clare

Tucked into the front wall of an ordinary farm shed in County Clare are three fragments of stone that have no business being there: two ogee-loop heads and a loop sillstone, the kind of finely cut architectural details associated with late medieval tower houses, not agricultural outbuildings.

Ogee loops are narrow window or arrow openings finished with a distinctive S-curved or pointed arch, carved with a degree of craft that suggests their original home was something considerably grander than a shed.

The fragments almost certainly originate from Cappagh tower house, a medieval fortified residence that stands roughly 400 metres to the south-south-west. Tower houses were the dominant form of elite residence across Ireland from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and their cut stonework, once a building fell into ruin or disuse, had a long afterlife as convenient building material for nearby farms and field walls. This process, known as spoliation, was extremely common in rural Ireland, and it means that pieces of carved medieval stonework occasionally surface in the most prosaic of settings. Here, two window heads and a sill have been pressed into service as ordinary wall infill, their decorative profiles still visible but their original function long since abandoned.

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