House - indeterminate date, Kiltiernan, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Kiltiernan, Co. Galway

Within the old ecclesiastical enclosure at Kiltiernan in County Galway, a small rectangular building sits pressed against the enclosure wall, its surviving masonry rising to little more than a course or two of stone.

What makes it quietly curious is a detail of construction that feels almost contradictory: the south-west and north-west corners are rounded on the outside but sharply angled within, a quirk that suggests either a particular local building tradition or a practical response to the weight and stress of the surrounding structure.

The building was one of three house sites excavated within the enclosure by M. V. Duignan across two seasons, in 1950 and 1953. An ecclesiastical enclosure is the roughly circular or oval boundary, usually defined by an earthen bank or stone wall, that marked out the sacred and domestic territory of an early Irish monastic or church site. The walls of this particular structure were built in double-faced rubble masonry, meaning two outer stone faces with rubble packed between them, a common technique in early medieval Irish construction. The interior measured approximately seven metres east to west and just under four metres north to south, with the entrance positioned centrally in the south wall. The finds recovered from inside complicate any simple reading of the building's history. A quernstone fragment, used for grinding grain, and an iron knife dated broadly to the tenth through fourteenth centuries suggest early or central medieval occupation, while modern earthenware and clay pipes indicate the space was disturbed or reused at a much later period. Animal bones and oyster shells point to domestic activity, the ordinary accumulation of meals eaten within those walls across whatever span of years the building was in use.

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