House - indeterminate date, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

At the south-eastern edge of the stone fort known as Caherdoon in Ballynahown, County Clare, a small structure clings to the outer wall face of the enclosure in a way that raises more questions than it answers.

It is easy to overlook, partly because it survives only in fragmentary form, and partly because the record left by those who examined it cannot quite agree on what shape it was.

When the antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited and wrote about the site in 1905, he described the remains in his text as the lower portion of a small circular hut, joined to the rampart by side walls on the south-east. A caherdoon or caher is a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common across Ireland from the early medieval period, and structures attached to their outer walls are not unheard of, though they are rarely well preserved. What makes this particular case quietly puzzling is that Westropp's own plan of the monuments, published in the same article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, tells a different story. Rather than a round hut, the plan shows a rectangular structure, estimated at roughly five metres long and four metres wide, further subdivided by an internal wall running across the short axis, slightly west of centre. Whether the discrepancy reflects a change in interpretation between writing the text and drawing the plan, or simply the difficulty of reading collapsed stonework in the field, is impossible to say at this distance.

The structure has never been formally excavated, so its date and function remain unresolved. It may have served as a small outbuilding or workshop ancillary to whoever occupied the fort itself. For now it sits in the category of things that were noticed, partially recorded, and left for someone else to figure out.

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Pete F
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