House - indeterminate date, Conranstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

House

House – indeterminate date, Conranstown, Co. Westmeath

On a low rise in the rolling pastureland of County Westmeath, somebody once built a house inside a ringfort, and the stone foundations of that decision are still visible today.

The arrangement is unusual enough to pause over: not a defensive structure, not a souterrain, but a domestic dwelling deliberately sited within the earthen bank of an earlier enclosure. Ringforts, which are roughly circular farmsteads enclosed by one or more earthen or stone banks, were built predominantly in the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. Finding later house remains tucked inside one raises quiet questions about how people related to the landscape they inherited.

The remains at Conranstown consist of stone foundations forming two conjoined spaces. The southern portion is nearly square in plan and presses directly against the interior of the ringfort's southern bank, using it, in effect, as a ready-made wall. Attached to its north is a longer rectangular structure, with what appears to have been an entrance positioned at the centre of its eastern side. A short partition bank runs north to south from the northern corner and connects with the ringfort's own northern bank, suggesting that the builders were integrating their construction with the older earthwork rather than simply sheltering within it by accident. The date of the house remains unresolved; the site is described only as indeterminate in age, which is itself a telling detail, placing it somewhere in the long stretch of time after the ringfort's own construction without being more precise than that.

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