House - indeterminate date, Barnaderg, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
Inside a cashel on the Galway landscape, five small houses survive in various states of partial ruin, arranged within the enclosure's interior.
A cashel is a type of stone ringfort, a circular or oval area bounded by a dry-stone wall, widely used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead. One of these five structures occupies the south-western quadrant of the enclosure, and what survives of it is quietly legible even in its reduced state.
The house presents itself as a level, stone-free rectangular area measuring roughly six metres east to west and just over three metres north to south. Intermittent lines of boulders mark its outline, and along the northern and eastern sides there are traces of double wall-facing, the technique of building two parallel stone skins with rubble packed between them, which gives a wall both its thickness and its stability. Here the wall appears to have been about 1.3 metres thick. No date has been firmly established for this structure, which places it in the company of many early Irish buildings whose precise period of use remains difficult to pin down without excavation.