Building, Coole Demesne, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Utility Structures
Within the grounds of Coole Demesne in County Galway, better known as the estate associated with Lady Gregory and the Irish Literary Revival, there is a far older presence that has little to do with the world of Yeats and the Abbey Theatre.
Tucked into the south-east quadrant of a cashel, a cashel being a circular stone enclosure of early medieval origin typically used to define a farmstead or family settlement, sits a small ruined building whose proportions and construction suggest a domestic or agricultural function stretching back centuries before the demesne ever took its familiar shape.
The building measures roughly four metres north to south and just under four metres east to west, built using double-walling, a technique in which two parallel faces of stone are raised with rubble or smaller material between them, giving the walls considerable solidity. The south wall is the best preserved section, surviving to an internal height of around forty centimetres and an external height of fifty, with a width of eighty-five centimetres. A narrow gap in the north wall, just sixty centimetres wide, opens into a smaller out-building measuring approximately two point eight metres north to south. That out-building's north wall appears to continue westward from the main structure, though it has largely collapsed. Extending from the south-west corner of the main building is what may be a haggard wall, a haggard being the yard or enclosure attached to a farm where hay and grain were stored. This wall, built from a single line of boulders and standing around sixty centimetres high, curves south-eastward until it meets the cashel wall, effectively closing off a small yard between the building and the enclosure boundary. The whole arrangement, a principal structure, an out-house, and a curving yard wall, points to a modest agricultural complex operating within, and making deliberate use of, the existing cashel.