House - indeterminate date, Ballygastell, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
House
In the landscape of Ballygastell in County Clare, a small rectangular building sits quietly within the south-eastern quarter of a cashel, its walls long since fallen and grown over with grass.
A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval origin in Ireland, used to define and defend a farmstead or settlement. What remains of this house is a low, collapsed wall, roughly a metre and a half wide and no more than eighty centimetres high at its tallest, tracing a footprint that measures just over twelve metres from north to south and a little over three metres across.
The interior was not simply one open space. An internal wall divided the building roughly in half, and tucked into the north-western corner of the northern half is a smaller room, measuring only 1.6 metres by 1.1 metres internally, little larger than a modest cupboard. Whether that room served as storage, a sleeping cell, or something else entirely is unknown. The date of construction is indeterminate; no period has been confidently assigned to it. The doorway, wherever it once was, is no longer obvious from what survives above ground. The building sits as one element within a larger enclosed site, suggesting it was part of a working complex rather than an isolated structure, though what that complex looked like in use, and who lived or worked within it, remains unrecorded.