House - indeterminate date, Blakestown, Co. Wicklow

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House

House – indeterminate date, Blakestown, Co. Wicklow

On a gently sloping hillside at Blakestown in County Wicklow, a cluster of small ruined houses sits arranged against a low rock shelf as though pressed there for protection.

Three of the structures, each only a few metres across, occupy the sheltered ground immediately beside the shelf, and two of them are enclosed within a D-shaped enclosure roughly eleven metres in diameter, its straight edge formed by the rock itself. A fourth house stands alone about twenty-five metres to the west, slightly larger than its neighbours at approximately 5.50 by 4.60 metres, separated enough to suggest a distinct household or perhaps a later addition to the settlement.

The date of this small settlement is recorded simply as indeterminate, which in itself says something. These are not the remains of a grand estate or a documented eviction-era village. They are the kind of modest, rubble-walled structures that once housed rural families across upland Wicklow, their origins unrecorded and their abandonment equally unannounced. The use of a natural rock shelf as both shelter and structural boundary is a practical arrangement seen in small vernacular settlements throughout Ireland, where builders worked with the landscape rather than against it. The D-shaped enclosure, with the rock forming the flat side of the D, would have offered a degree of wind protection on what the steeper slopes below suggest is an exposed hillside. The houses range from around 4.60 by 3.65 metres to 4.60 by 5.48 metres, dimensions consistent with single-room or two-room vernacular dwellings of the post-medieval period, though nothing in the surviving remains fixes them more precisely to any century.

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Pete F
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