House - indeterminate date, Baile An Ghlaisín, Co. Kerry

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House

House – indeterminate date, Baile An Ghlaisín, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Baile An Ghlaisín on the Dingle Peninsula, the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map records the presence of a cashel, a stone-walled early medieval enclosure, by little more than a slight curve in the townland boundary line.

No symbol, no label, just a barely perceptible deviation in an administrative line. And yet the physical remains are more legible than that cartographic silence suggests: the enclosing wall can still be traced around its full perimeter, and within it sit two rectangular house sites and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with storage or refuge.

One of those house sites presses up against the southern arc of the cashel wall, as if tucked in for shelter or simply making use of existing stonework. Internally it runs roughly seven metres north to south and just over four and a half metres east to west, a modest but not cramped domestic footprint. The drystone walls, built without mortar, survive to a height of no more than sixty-five centimetres, though they are nearly a metre thick, which hints at the solidity of the original construction. Two doorways face each other across the width of the building, one in the east wall and one in the west, measuring at least half a metre and eighty centimetres wide respectively. Both have been damaged or altered over time, enough that their original form cannot be recovered with confidence. The date of the structure, like most things about it, remains unresolved. These details were recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986, a systematic effort to document the extraordinary concentration of early remains across the Dingle Peninsula.

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