House - 18th/19th century, Caherblonick, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
House
At Caherblonick in County Clare, the low remains of a rectangular house sit just one metre outside the south-western wall of a cashel, the kind of dry-stone enclosure that was a common feature of early Irish settlement.
That proximity is quietly telling. Whoever built or occupied this small structure chose to place themselves almost against the ancient boundary, close enough to shelter against it without stepping inside.
The house itself is modest by any measure. Its internal dimensions run roughly 3.8 metres on the northwest to southeast axis and 3.4 metres on the other, with walls surviving to only about 0.3 metres in height and a metre in width, reduced now to little more than a grassy outline in the ground. Dating to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, it does not stand alone in the landscape. Three further houses of the same period lie approximately fifteen metres to the west, and the grouping suggests these structures may all have belonged to the same small settlement or farming cluster, a community pressed close to a much older enclosure whose original purpose had long since passed.
