House - indeterminate date, Carrick, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

House

House – indeterminate date, Carrick, Co. Westmeath

Tucked into the west-north-west corner of a ringfort near Carrick in County Westmeath, a low and largely forgotten house site sits slightly below the surrounding ground, its outline barely legible in the landscape.

What survives is a large, roughly rectangular depression edged by faint traces of a bank along its upper side, the kind of feature that could easily be dismissed as a natural dip in the field until you know what you are looking at.

A ringfort, to give some context, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built primarily during the early medieval period in Ireland as a defended farmstead. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The house site here occupies the WNW quadrant of the ringfort recorded as WM026-081, and its sunken floor level, sitting below the interior of the ringfort itself, is a telling detail. Sunken-floored structures within ringforts are known from excavated examples elsewhere in Ireland, where the slight hollow helped define the domestic space and may have contributed to insulation or drainage. No date has been firmly assigned to this particular structure, so whether it belongs to the original occupation of the ringfort or represents a later phase of use remains an open question.

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Pete F
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