House - indeterminate date, Carrigbrack, Co. Waterford

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House

House – indeterminate date, Carrigbrack, Co. Waterford

Along the eastern bank of the Colligan River in County Waterford's upper valley, the stone footings of a small two-room structure sit in what was once rough pasture. The building measures roughly eight metres north to south and less than two and a half metres east to west, proportions that suggest a long, narrow dwelling of the kind common to rural Ireland across several centuries. What makes it quietly puzzling is the absence of any visible entrance. No doorway, no threshold, no obvious gap in the wall-footing survives to indicate how its occupants moved in or out.

The structure was recorded when this stretch of the Colligan valley still retained something of its older character. By 1993, however, land reclamation work had begun transforming the area, and when surveyors returned in 2011 the building could no longer be identified on the ground. The dating remains indeterminate, meaning nothing in the physical remains or the documentary record places it confidently within a particular period. Stone wall-footings of this kind, the low courses of unmortared or lime-mortared stone that once supported earthen or timber walls above, can belong almost anywhere from the medieval period to the nineteenth century, and without excavation or associated finds it is rarely possible to be more precise. The Colligan River flows southward through the Comeragh uplands before reaching Dungarvan, and this upper section of the valley would have supported small farming settlements at various points in history, many of them now entirely absorbed back into the landscape.

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Pete F
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