House - indeterminate date, Noughaval, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Noughaval, Co. Clare

At Noughaval in County Clare, a low rectangle of grass-covered stone walls sits at what appears to be the visible centre of a cluster of old settlement remains.

The building is modest in every measurable sense, roughly 6 metres east to west and just over 3 metres north to south on the interior, with walls that have long since merged with the ground around them. What makes it quietly interesting is one particular detail: a later drystone wall, the kind built without mortar by stacking stones carefully against one another, seems to overlie the western wall of the house. Someone, at some point after the original structure fell out of use, repurposed its fabric for a new boundary or enclosure, layering one era of building directly onto another.

The house belongs to a wider pocket of surviving remains at Noughaval, and its position at the apparent heart of that cluster suggests it may once have had some organising role in the settlement, though its date remains undetermined. Roughly 69 metres to the north-north-east stands the medieval church of Noughaval, accompanied by its graveyard, both of which place this landscape firmly within a long tradition of religious and community activity in the area. A short distance further east, about 78 metres away, is a house dated to the 16th or 17th century, which at least gives a rough sense of one phase of occupation in the immediate vicinity. The undated house sits somewhere in relation to all of this, its chronology unresolved, its walls slowly dissolving back into the field.

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Pete F
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