Building, Cloncullen, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Utility Structures

Building, Cloncullen, Co. Westmeath

On a south-facing slope in County Westmeath, just to the west of Cloncullen castle, two rectangular buildings have been quietly dissolving into the pasture for long enough that by 1983 their walls had become little more than grass-covered footings.

What makes the site quietly odd is that it preserves not one but two distinct structures, their foundations adjoining and overlapping in a way that suggests a more complex history of use and rebuilding than the landscape now lets on. Scattered stony mounds of irregular shape add further texture to the field, hinting that whatever stood here was once substantial enough to leave its mark in several directions at once.

The buildings appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, which places them clearly to the west of the castle, so they were recognisable features of the landscape at least by the time of that survey. The larger of the two structures measures roughly twenty metres east to west and seven and a half metres north to south, with its wall footings adjoining the southern end of the first building and extending eastward. The first building, oriented north to south and measuring approximately seventeen metres by six and a half metres, sits slightly upslope. Their relationship to the nearby castle is unspecified in the surviving record, but the proximity and the shared orientation suggest the two were likely connected in some functional or domestic capacity, perhaps as outbuildings, a hall, or domestic quarters associated with the castle complex.

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Pete F
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