That ambiguity is itself telling. When surveyors cannot confidently assign even a broad period to a building, it usually signals one of a few things: the remains are fragmentary enough to resist dating, the construction technique was so locally persistent that it could belong to almost any era, or the site simply has not yet received the close attention it warrants. In rural Connacht, all three explanations have been true of structures that were later found to be genuinely significant.