House - indeterminate date, Eochaill, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Eochaill, Co. Galway

Inside a cashel at Eochaill in County Galway, two houses once stood, or so the stones suggested.

A cashel is a type of early Irish stone ringfort, its circular enclosing wall built without mortar, and within this particular example two separate domestic structures were at some point identified in different quarters of the interior. Both are now gone from view entirely, leaving no visible surface traces whatsoever.

The scholar John O'Donovan, whose nineteenth-century fieldwork for the Ordnance Survey produced some of the most detailed early accounts of Irish monuments, noted a round pile of stones in the northern sector of the cashel's interior that appeared to represent the ruins of an oblong or oval house. A second structure was observed in the south-eastern quadrant, though by that point it was so thoroughly collapsed that no measurements could be taken. This latter observation was recorded by O'Flanagan in 1927, drawing on the earlier documentary evidence. The date of the houses themselves remains undetermined; they could belong to the early medieval period associated with cashel construction, or to a later phase of occupation entirely. What now occupies the northern sector, where one of those houses once left its faint impression in the rubble, is a modern clearance cairn, the kind of mounded pile that results when farmers gather field stones to clear the ground for grazing or cultivation, an everyday act that in this case has quietly buried whatever remained of the earlier evidence.

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