House - indeterminate date, Poulcaragharush, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

House

House – indeterminate date, Poulcaragharush, Co. Clare

A modern farm lane runs along the southern edge of this site, its drystone boundary wall built directly on top of the southern wall of a much older house, quietly erasing one edge of a structure that was already half-forgotten.

That accidental layering, the living farm infrastructure pressing down on the archaeological, is a small but telling detail about how rural Ireland tends to absorb rather than clear away its past.

The house is one of six that together form a settlement cluster on level pasture just to the north-west of Carran Church and its associated graveyard, with the Poulacarran Valley opening out to the east below. The structure itself is rectangular, measuring roughly 6.6 metres east to west and just 2.25 metres across internally, built from a double-faced stone wall, meaning two parallel lines of stone with the gap between them filled or left as a core, a construction method common across many periods of Irish rural building. The walls now survive to only 0.2 to 0.5 metres in height. A gap of about 2.2 metres in the northern wall, positioned 1.75 metres from its western end, most likely marks the original doorway. Immediately to the north of the house, a small raised platform defined by low scarps and a bank on the west side may have served as a garden plot, a detail that gives the ruin a sense of the domestic routines that once organised the space around it. Two neighbouring houses survive nearby, one roughly 7.5 metres to the south-east and another about 15 metres to the north, close enough that the settlement would have felt genuinely communal at whatever point it was occupied. The date of that occupation remains uncertain.

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Pete F
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