House - indeterminate date, Clooneen, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Clooneen, Co. Clare

Tucked into the south-east corner of a cashel in Clooneen, County Clare, a small rectangular structure survives in a state of deliberate ambiguity.

Nobody knows when it was built, or by whom, or for how long it was occupied. What remains are two grass-covered stone walls, each between one and one point three metres wide and standing only thirty centimetres above the ground, meeting at a rounded corner on the north-west side. The east and south walls have disappeared entirely from view, most likely absorbed into the rubble that now obscures the inner face of the surrounding cashel wall.

A cashel is a roughly circular stone enclosure, the Irish equivalent of a ringfort but built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and they were constructed and used across many centuries of Irish prehistory and early medieval life. This particular cashel in Clooneen contains at least two of these small internal structures. The house described here, measuring roughly two point nine metres on its longer axis and two point five metres across, sits in the south-east quadrant. A second structure of similarly indeterminate date lies around eighteen metres to the west-north-west, set against the opposite side of the enclosure wall. The possible entrance to the cashel is situated just to the north of this first house, a placement that would have made the dwelling immediately visible, perhaps deliberately so, to anyone entering the enclosure.

What is quietly strange about this site is precisely the uncertainty it embodies. The walls are too low and too fragmentary to suggest a function with any confidence. The rounded corner, a small but telling detail, hints at craft and intention, yet the building's purpose, its date, and its relationship to whoever lived or worked within the cashel remain entirely open questions. The rubble that swallowed two of its four sides has preserved a kind of archaeological silence that no amount of surveying has yet broken.

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Pete F
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