House - indeterminate date, Pollaturk, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Pollaturk, Co. Galway

On a hilltop at Pollaturk in County Galway, the outlines of two possible house foundations survive within the ruins of a cashel, the whole complex so thoroughly collapsed and overgrown that it takes a practised eye to read the landscape at all.

A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically circular or subcircular, built in early medieval Ireland to define a farmstead or settlement. This one measures roughly 37 metres across its northeast to southwest axis, its drystone boundary wall long since fallen and partly absorbed by a later field wall that cuts across it from the southeast around to the northeast, layering one era of land use on top of another in the way that Irish upland sites so often do.

Within the interior, two structures have been tentatively identified. The first, towards the north of centre, is a rectangular spread of collapsed stone running east to west, approximately ten metres long and seven metres wide. The second, in the southeast quadrant, survives only as an L-shaped line of stone buried under grass, its original form and dimensions now largely guesswork. Neither can be dated with confidence, which is part of what makes the site quietly interesting: it sits beside a cairn to its west-northwest, and both features occupy the same hilltop enclosure, suggesting a place that accumulated significance across a considerable span of time, though exactly what kind of significance, and when, remains open. The site was documented by Byrne and Gosling in 1988 and later included in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling, published in 1999.

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