House - indeterminate date, Cahermacrusheen, Co. Clare

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House – indeterminate date, Cahermacrusheen, Co. Clare

At Cahermacrusheen in County Clare, there is a house that you can feel before you can see it.

Hidden beneath dense overgrowth, its walls have collapsed to a mere twenty centimetres in height, but the spread of stone underfoot still traces the shape of a dwelling, a circular structure roughly ten and a half metres across at its widest, with an interior space of about six metres. It is the kind of site that rewards slow movement and a careful boot rather than a camera.

The house sits at the centre of a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure used in early medieval Ireland to demarcate farmsteads or small settlements, typically the property of a single family or kin group. This particular cashel, recorded separately, would have provided both a boundary and a degree of protection for whoever lived within it. The circular form of the house itself is consistent with early Irish domestic building traditions, though the date of construction remains undetermined. What survives is a low, spread rubble wall between one and three metres wide, the stones long since tumbled and settled into the ground, the whole arrangement now more geological than architectural in appearance. The overgrowth that obscures it has, in a roundabout way, also preserved it, keeping the footprint largely intact even as it defeated casual observation.

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Pete F
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