House - indeterminate date, Poulcaragharush, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
House
In a field of level pasture just northwest of Carran Church in County Clare, a roofless stone house sits at the centre of what was once a small but organised community.
Nobody knows when it was built or abandoned, and no name has come down with it, yet the walls that remain tell a surprisingly detailed story about the shape of domestic life here, whenever that life was lived.
The house is the largest of six in a settlement cluster that occupied this corner of the Burren, on ground overlooking the Poulacarran Valley to the east. It measures 15.3 metres along its longer axis and between 6.65 and 7 metres across, and its walls are double-faced, meaning they were constructed as two parallel skins of stone with the gap between them filled, a method that gave them considerable solidity. The northern wall still stands between 0.6 and 0.9 metres high; the southern wall has settled lower, to between 0.3 and 0.7 metres. Inside, the ground level is lower than outside, a detail that sometimes reflects deliberate construction and sometimes simply centuries of accumulated earth building up around the exterior. A low cross-wall, now worn almost flush with the floor, divided the interior into two rooms, with a doorway 0.9 metres wide connecting them. No entrance through the outer walls has been clearly identified, though surveyors consider the south wall the most likely location for one. What gives the house its particular character within the settlement is its relationship to movement: a road or trackway runs immediately along its southern side, parallel to the wall, then curves around the southwest corner and continues northwest toward another house roughly nine metres away. A further house lies about fifteen metres to the south. The whole arrangement suggests a settlement that was not simply a scatter of buildings but something more deliberate, with paths threading between structures and the largest house positioned along the main route through.