House - 17th century, Graystown, Co. Tipperary

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House

House – 17th century, Graystown, Co. Tipperary

What looks at first glance like an ordinary field of rocky pasture at Graystown in County Tipperary turns out, on closer inspection, to be the ghostly outline of a small settlement.

The ground here preserves the grass-covered wall-footings of at least four possible houses, arranged along a central road, all sitting within a rectangular field of rock outcrop that the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels, intriguingly, as a Fair Green. Fair greens were the designated open spaces where livestock fairs and markets were held, often at the edges of settlements, and the survival of that name on an early map hints at a once-active community where animals were traded and people gathered.

The complex sits immediately north of a tower house, a bawn, and a further house, all part of the same broader Graystown cluster. A bawn, in Irish architectural terms, is a walled enclosure attached to or surrounding a tower house, typically used to protect livestock and sometimes to shelter dependants. To the east of the central road lie two large sub-circular enclosures that may represent settlement plots, the kind of subdivided ground associated with small nucleated communities of the seventeenth century. Within the southern quadrant of the larger of these enclosures, one rectangular house survives in particularly legible form: a sunken area roughly six metres north to south and just over nine metres east to west, dropping between forty and eighty centimetres below the surrounding ground surface, enclosed by a low scarp, with what appears to be an entrance gap of around 1.2 metres at the southwest corner, and further enclosures running off the east and west ends of the structure. The depression and the scarp are the kind of subtle earthwork signatures that read as almost nothing from a distance but resolve into architecture once you understand what you are looking at.

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