House - indeterminate date, Seefin, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
Inside a cashel on the hill of Seefin in County Galway, a low, grassed-over wall traces an L-shaped line across the ground.
It stands no more than thirty to forty centimetres above the surface, and stretches to a width of just over a metre, yet it outlines what may once have been a rectangular house, roughly five and a half metres long and four and a half metres wide, oriented northwest to southeast. The structure is tentative in the archaeological record, described only as a possible house site, and its date remains entirely unknown.
A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, built in early medieval Ireland as a form of fortified farmstead or settlement. This one at Seefin sits alongside the Daly Monument, a later feature that occupies much of the northeastern quadrant of the enclosure's interior. The relationship between the monument and the partial wall is not recorded, but the house outline lies just to the east of it, the two features sharing the same bounded space across what may be a considerable span of time. Whether the house predates the monument, postdates it, or belongs to an entirely different phase of activity at the site is a question the ground itself has not yet answered.