House - 16th/17th century, Ballinvinny, Co. Cork

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House

House – 16th/17th century, Ballinvinny, Co. Cork

At Ballinvinny in County Cork, excavation work brought to light the remains of a house that survives only as a ghost of itself: a hearth with no recoverable walls, a fire with no room left around it.

It is one of five such structures identified at the site, together forming a small post-medieval settlement that was occupied sometime during the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

What makes the setting especially layered is that this cluster of houses was not built on open ground but directly on top of an earlier medieval moated site. A moated site, to use the term as archaeologists intend it, is a farmstead or small manor enclosed by a water-filled ditch, a form of defended rural settlement common in Ireland during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By the time these post-medieval houses went up, that earlier enclosure had presumably fallen out of use, and the new occupants built their settlement across its footprint. The house in question stood roughly eight metres to the south of the moated enclosure's boundary. Archaeological work, published by Cotter in 2003 and 2005, recovered clear evidence of a hearth within this structure, placing domestic life firmly at the spot, but the walls themselves left insufficient traces to map their layout with any confidence. The result is a site defined more by absence than by presence, which is itself a kind of information: the materials used were probably timber or other perishables that left little behind once the occupation ended.

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