House - indeterminate date, Noughaval, Co. Clare

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House – indeterminate date, Noughaval, Co. Clare

Within the enclosure of Caherwalsh cashel in County Clare, a shallow rectangular depression in the ground, measuring roughly 3.8 metres east to west and 2.8 metres north to south, marks what may once have been a house.

A mound of stone sits close by, the kind of quiet accumulation that tends to signal a collapsed structure rather than a natural feature. On its own, the depression would be easy to overlook entirely, but it sits inside a cashel, a stone-walled ringfort enclosure, that was itself part of a larger, multi-period field system, and that context transforms it from an unremarkable earthwork into a fragment of a much longer story of occupation and use.

The site appears on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which at least establishes it was visible and mappable at that point, though the date of the house itself remains unknown. What the ground preserves is a cluster of activity rather than a single moment: a larger house lies roughly nine metres to the west, and further possible smaller house sites abut the west wall and north-west corner of the cashel. Four D-shaped structures, two positioned at the north-east and two at the south-east, are built directly against the inner face of the cashel wall, using it as a ready-made back wall in the manner common to settlements that grew organically within an existing enclosure over generations. The depression under discussion sits in the south-east quadrant, close to two of those D-shaped buildings, suggesting this corner of the cashel was particularly well used at some point, or several points, in its life.

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Pete F
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