House - indeterminate date, Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare

Near Lisdoonvarna in County Clare, tucked into the north-western corner of an ancient cashel, the outline of a possible house survives in a shape that quietly refuses to resolve itself.

It presents as a D-shaped enclosure, roughly 9.1 metres east to west, with a straight western side running about 7.5 metres. That straight edge is the puzzle: it belongs not to the original structure but to a later field wall, running north to south, that cuts directly across the cashel interior. Whether the enclosure was once fully circular and simply got sliced by that later boundary, or whether it was always something closer to a D, cannot be said with certainty. No corresponding trace has been found on the western side of the wall to settle the question.

A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland and built typically to protect a farmstead and its inhabitants. This one, to which the possible house belongs, forms the broader context for a small cluster of remains. Two further structures lie nearby, one a confirmed house site and another a possible house site, at roughly 12 metres to the south-east and 22 metres to the east-south-east respectively, suggesting this corner of Clare once held a modest concentration of domestic activity. What period that activity belongs to remains unresolved; the house site carries only an indeterminate date, a reminder that the archaeological record is often more comfortable with shapes and relationships than with chronology.

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Pete F
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