House - indeterminate date, Keernaun, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Keernaun, Co. Galway

At Keernaun in County Galway, three small structures sit inside and against the remains of a cashel, their walls so degraded that their original purpose and age remain genuinely uncertain.

A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically early medieval in date, built to protect a settlement or farmstead, and these buildings appear to have grown from it organically, some tucked within its boundary, one seemingly constructed using the cashel wall itself as a structural element.

The three outlines differ notably from one another. The first, on the south-south-west interior, is a subrectangular area running roughly north to south, about five metres in length, with at least its outer face still legible in the collapsed stonework. The second, on the north-north-east arc of the cashel wall, is a small roughly circular hut, little more than a metre and a third in diameter, which may represent a subsidiary or functional space rather than a dwelling in any conventional sense. Immediately to the south of that sits the third structure, a rectangular area approximately 2.9 metres long and 1.7 metres wide, oriented north-west to south-east and apparently built directly into the cashel wall rather than simply beside it. That last detail is archaeologically suggestive: it implies the cashel wall was already present, and possibly already partially ruined, when whoever built the rectangular structure decided to make use of whatever was standing.

No dating evidence is recorded for any of the three buildings, and the indeterminate label attached to the site is not a bureaucratic hedge so much as an honest reflection of how little can be said with confidence. The relationship between the huts and the cashel raises questions about sequence and reuse that the visible remains, in their current state of collapse, cannot easily answer.

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