House - indeterminate date, Cahermacnaghten, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Cahermacnaghten, Co. Clare

Among the limestone expanses of the Burren in County Clare, where ancient field systems and stone enclosures crowd one another across the karst plateau, a small rectangular building sits roughly forty metres south-east of Caheridoula cashel, quietly resisting easy categorisation.

Its date is unknown. It belongs to a cluster of structures dense enough to be called a nucleated settlement, meaning a group of buildings gathered closely together rather than scattered across a landscape, and one field wall has already been shown to overlie the southern wall of a neighbouring house, hinting at successive phases of use and abandonment that nobody has yet fully untangled.

What survives are the wall-footings, and they are informative in their own right. The building measures 6.2 by 4.4 metres internally, with walls a metre thick, built from flat-bedded masonry with rounded quoins at the corners. That last detail, the careful rounding of the corner stones, suggests a degree of craft that sets it apart from purely functional field construction. As Fitzpatrick noted in 2009, the building is smaller than comparable structures at Cahermacnaghten, Cahermore, and Ballyganner, and it differs from them in one particular way: its entrance appears to have been in the western gable end rather than in one of the long walls. That single architectural choice makes it an outlier among its near neighbours, and whether it reflects an earlier tradition, a different function, or simply individual preference, remains an open question.

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Pete F
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