House - indeterminate date, Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare

Within the interior of a cashel near Lisdoonvarna, a D-shaped patch of ground roughly six metres across preserves what may once have been a dwelling.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, and this one contains within its northeast quadrant a collapsed, grass-covered wall curving from east-northeast around to the west. What gives the site its quietly puzzling quality is the straight edge along its northern side, which turns out to belong not to the house itself but to a later field wall that was built across the cashel interior at some point after the original settlement. That intrusion may have sliced through a structure that was originally circular in plan, leaving only the D-shape visible today.

The relationship between the two phases of use is unresolved. It is genuinely unclear whether the building was always D-shaped or whether the field wall truncated a roundhouse, the kind of circular domestic structure associated with early medieval ringfort settlements across Ireland. What is legible on the ground is a ten-metre straight northern boundary and a curved collapsed wall forming the remainder of the outline, all heavily grassed over. Two other possible house sites lie nearby within the same cashel complex, one roughly seven metres to the west-southwest and another around twenty-two metres to the west-northwest, suggesting that this was at some point a more substantial enclosed settlement rather than a single isolated dwelling.

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Pete F
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