House - indeterminate date, Lisnagranshy, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
Inside a rath on the edge of Lisnagranshy in County Galway, the ground holds the outlines of what were once three rectangular structures.
A rath, to give the briefest explanation, is a ringfort, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. What makes this particular site quietly interesting is not the enclosure itself but what sits within it: the partial remains of domestic buildings, low-walled and long-abandoned, still legible enough in the landscape to have attracted the attention of at least two separate generations of investigators.
A researcher named McCaffrey, writing in 1952, recorded three rectangular house sites clustered within the eastern half of the rath interior. One of these was substantial by any measure, running to roughly 19.5 metres in length and 9.7 metres in width, with walls that still stood about 0.6 metres high and measured nearly a metre across. These are not the dimensions of a minor outbuilding. When the site was visited again in February 1983, three subrectangular features were identified at the north-east, south-east, and south-west of the interior, and these are thought to correspond to the houses McCaffrey had described thirty years earlier. The date of the structures remains unresolved; the association with the rath suggests early medieval origins are plausible, but no firm attribution has been established.