House - indeterminate date, Caherloghan, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Caherloghan, Co. Clare

Inside a cashel on the Caherloghan landscape in County Clare, a rectangular structure occupies the northern sector of the enclosure, its low drystone walls still legible beneath a coating of moss.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a form of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland, and this one contains several distinct features crowded within its circuit. What makes this particular structure quietly arresting is the way it was built not in isolation but in conversation with the cashel itself, borrowing the internal face of the enclosing wall as its eastern boundary and the cashel's own internal dividing wall as its western limit.

The rectangular space measures roughly twelve metres east to west and ten metres north to south. The northern wall, built from very large boulders, has a somewhat random character, as though assembled from whatever was most immediately to hand. The southern wall is longer and considerably thicker, running to about 3.2 metres in width, and carries a breach roughly two metres wide, set slightly off-centre towards the east, which may represent an original entrance. Immediately to the south of this structure sits another hut site, and a further one occupies the south-western sector of the cashel, suggesting the enclosure once sheltered several small buildings arranged around a shared interior. The date of the structure has not been established with any precision, which is itself telling; drystone architecture of this kind can be difficult to assign to a particular period without excavation, and the site at Caherloghan has not yielded the kind of material evidence that would settle the question. The grass-covered, level interior gives little away.

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Pete F
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