House - indeterminate date, Cloghboley, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Cloghboley, Co. Galway

Inside a cashel at Cloghboley in County Galway, four rectangular house foundations are laid out across the enclosure interior, each in a different state of survival, each occupying a different corner of the space.

A cashel is a roughly circular stone enclosure, essentially a fortified farmstead of early medieval Ireland, and finding domestic structures within one is not unusual. What catches the attention here is the sheer layering of the site: one house was built directly over part of an underground passage, or souterrain, while another has since been partly buried under a modern wall, and a third survives only as a low stone platform that reads more as a shadow of a building than a building itself.

The four houses range considerably in scale and condition. The first, in the north-west quadrant, has the clearest remains, with double-faced stone walls enclosing a space roughly six metres by four. Double-faced construction means the wall has two dressed outer surfaces with rubble packed between, a technique that suggests some degree of care in the original build. The second house, pressing up against the cashel wall at the north-east, was potentially divided into two rooms and measured around eight metres by five, though its remains are poorly preserved. The third, near the cashel entrance at the south-east, has lost most of its fabric and what survives is overlain by a later wall, making its original dimensions impossible to determine. The fourth, in the southern sector, is the smallest and most enigmatic: a low platform of large stone blocks, six metres by two and a half, which may represent the base of a structure or simply the last visible trace of one. McCaffrey noted the site in 1952, though the dates of the houses themselves remain unresolved.

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