House - indeterminate date, Lydacan, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Lydacan, Co. Galway

Within the earthen enclosure of a rath at Lydacan in County Galway, tucked into the south-western quadrant, are the barely legible remains of what may once have been a rectangular house.

A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular earthen ringfort, typically associated with early medieval farmsteads in Ireland, and the fact that a domestic structure appears to have stood inside one here is not unusual in itself. What is unusual is the layering of what survives: low, collapsed walling on three sides, a fourth side that has almost entirely dissolved back into the ground, and a neighbourhood that includes both a souterrain and a nineteenth-century burial vault within a few metres.

The footprint of the structure measures approximately 11.9 metres east to west and 6.3 metres north to south. The walls along the western, eastern, and northern sides are still traceable as collapsed rubble, roughly 0.8 metres wide and standing no more than 0.2 metres above ground, little more than a low ridge in the grass. The southern wall has largely disappeared, leaving only very indistinct foundations. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage or refuge, lies about 1.5 metres to the north of the house remains. Just beyond that sits a nineteenth-century burial vault, an altogether different era pressing close against the traces of a much older one. No date has been established for the house itself, which leaves open a broad span of possibilities within the long history of occupation that raths represent.

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Pete F
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