House - indeterminate date, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Ballyganner, Co. Clare

Just outside the entrance of a stone cashel in Ballyganner, County Clare, three small rectangular houses sit in a rough north-to-south line, their walls reduced over the centuries to low, grass-covered ridges barely half a metre high.

The northernmost of the three is a modest structure, its interior measuring roughly 3.8 metres north to south and 3 metres east to west, with walls between 0.6 and 0.8 metres thick. A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a dry-stone enclosure, typically circular or oval, used in early medieval Ireland to protect a farmstead or settlement. This one at Ballyganner still retains a discernible entrance, and the three houses cluster just beyond it to the north-east, arranged as though they were an organised extension of whatever community once occupied the enclosure.

The walls of this particular house retain well-defined inner and outer faces along the north wall, though the outer face of the east wall has disappeared into the rising ground behind it, swallowed gradually by the landscape. Dating these structures with any precision has not been possible, and the date remains indeterminate. What the arrangement does suggest is a functional relationship between the houses and a tower house that stands in the southern sector of the same cashel. Tower houses were fortified stone residences built in Ireland broadly between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their presence within or alongside older enclosures was not unusual. The clustering of smaller structures outside the cashel entrance may indicate dependent or subsidiary occupation, households living and working in the orbit of whoever held the tower house.

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Pete F
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