House - indeterminate date, Caherphuca, Co. Galway

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House – indeterminate date, Caherphuca, Co. Galway

At Caherphuca in County Galway, the ground holds the faint outlines of at least three rectangular buildings whose date nobody can say with confidence.

What survives is quietly legible if you know what to look for: stone wall foundations, a grassed-over platform, and opposing gaps in a wall that are thought to be original doorways rather than later breaks. The uncertainty attached to them is part of what makes them interesting. These are not ruins in any dramatic sense, more like the memory of buildings pressed into the soil.

The three structures sit within a large enclosure, a walled or banked boundary that would have defined a farmstead or settlement of some kind. The earliest systematic record of the site comes from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows two rectangular roofed buildings in the north-west and south-west of the enclosure interior. The north-western building, measuring roughly nine metres east to west and six metres wide, still survives as a foundation outline, though field clearance, the practice of gathering loose stones from farmland and dumping them elsewhere, has partly obscured it. The opposing gaps in its north and south walls suggest a straightforward through-passage, a common arrangement in vernacular buildings. The south-western building has fared worse and is now entirely buried under clearance material, though it appears to have been aligned north to south and sat directly against the enclosure wall. A third structure, not shown on the early OS map, survives at the southern end of the site as a grassed-over rectangular platform, ten metres long and five metres wide, its edges just distinct enough to trace.

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Pete F
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