Not medieval, not post-medieval, not modern: just indeterminate. That designation is rarer than it might seem. Most surviving structures can be anchored, however loosely, to a period through their materials, their form, or the documentary record. When none of those anchors hold, what remains is a building that has quietly resisted classification.

Carheens is a small townland in Galway, and the structure recorded there has been noted as a house of unknown date, which in archaeological terms can mean several things. It may be a ruin so fragmentary that its original form is unclear. It may be a building whose construction technique spans several periods, or one that was adapted and altered so many times that no single era can claim it. The Galway landscape holds a considerable variety of domestic structures, from the simple single-roomed cottages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to far older stone-walled dwellings whose origins are genuinely obscure. Without further detail, it is impossible to say which category this particular structure belongs to, and that ambiguity is precisely what places it in unusual company.