House - early medieval, Garraun, Co. Tipperary

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House

House – early medieval, Garraun, Co. Tipperary

In the upland grassland of Garraun in County Tipperary, partially obscured within the interior of a ringfort, lie the faint traces of what may once have been a rectangular early medieval house.

The possible wall-footings are modest in scale, roughly 7.2 metres on each side internally, with walls estimated at around 0.4 metres thick, and they appear to dissolve at the edge of a scarp along the south-eastern quadrant of the enclosure, as though the structure continued beyond where the ground now permits any reading.

The building sits within a ringfort, the type of roughly circular enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Most ringforts were domestic in function, sheltering a family and its livestock within an earthen bank and ditch. Finding structural remains inside one is not unusual in principle, but identifiable house-footings of this kind are far from common in the field record. This particular site occupies poorly drained reclaimed grassland at the base of a west-facing hill, with higher ground to the east and open views to the north and west. A small stream runs east to west immediately to the north of the enclosure, the sort of water source that would have been a practical necessity for any early medieval household.

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