House - indeterminate date, Coyne, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

House

House – indeterminate date, Coyne, Co. Westmeath

On a low rise in the rolling pastureland of Coyne, County Westmeath, the outlines of what were once domestic buildings survive as nothing more than shallow earthworks, barely legible against the grass.

What makes this cluster of remains quietly compelling is the layering: at least two rectangular house sites, and possibly a third of a lean-to style, arranged within and around an earlier ringfort. A ringfort, to give some context, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period as a farmstead or high-status settlement. That someone later chose to build inside one, or perhaps never fully abandoned the site at all, is the kind of detail that tends to slip through the broad narrative of Irish settlement history.

The main house site sits in the south-south-east quadrant of the ringfort and measures approximately 7.8 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 6.1 metres across, defined by a low bank roughly 1.3 metres wide. A second house site is visible to the north-west. Along the southern inner edge of the ringfort bank, two small mounds and a large stone may represent the footprint of a third structure, possibly a simple lean-to attached or adjacent to the enclosure wall itself. The date of these buildings remains unresolved, which is itself a common predicament with earthwork remains in Irish pasture: without excavation, a rectangular house platform can be early medieval, medieval, or considerably later, and the landscape offers no obvious clue. What can be said is that the site was recorded on oblique aerial photographs taken in July 1964, July 1966, and July 1970, where the roughly rectangular earthwork form is clearly visible from above, even where it barely registers at ground level.

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Pete F
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