House - indeterminate date, Clooneen, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Clooneen, Co. Clare

At the foot of Ballyganner Hill in County Clare, a low ring of stone sits in the middle of a field, its interior packed solid with rubble to the same height as its walls.

Nobody can say with any certainty when it was built or who lived there. The date is recorded simply as indeterminate, which in archaeological terms covers a vast stretch of human time in Ireland, from the prehistoric through to the medieval and beyond. That uncertainty, rather than diminishing the site, gives it a particular kind of weight.

The structure is subcircular, measuring roughly fourteen metres north to south and twelve and a half metres east to west, with an interior space of just over nine metres by eight and a half. The surrounding wall stands between half a metre and just under a metre high. What survives most clearly is the inner edge of that wall; the outer edge has been absorbed into the surrounding landscape and is no longer easily readable. Inside, the stone fill has accumulated level with the wallhead, obscuring whatever floor surface or features once lay beneath. The one exception is the hearth at the centre, a small but striking detail consisting of four stones set upright on edge, forming a rectangular setting roughly ninety centimetres long and fifty wide. A hearth placed at the centre of a round or subcircular house is a pattern that appears across many periods of Irish prehistory and the early medieval era, and its presence here gives at least some sense of how the space was once organised and inhabited. The southern portion of the site is partially covered by a moss-covered field bank, about a metre wide, that cuts across it and continues away to the south-south-east, suggesting that the landscape was reorganised at some point after the house fell out of use and that the earlier structure was simply incorporated into the new arrangement of the land. Roughly thirty metres to the north-north-west lies a cairn, a mound of stones that in the Irish landscape typically marks a burial, another layer of activity that suggests this small patch of ground has been returned to repeatedly over a very long period.

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