House - indeterminate date, Sheshymore, Co. Clare

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House

House – indeterminate date, Sheshymore, Co. Clare

On a limestone plateau in County Clare, swallowed by hazel scrub and rough pasture, there is a house that nobody can quite see.

Not from the ground, at any rate. When inspectors visited the site in 1997, the structure was simply not visible at ground level, the vegetation and terrain conspiring to erase it entirely from view. It was only decades later, through aerial photography taken between 2013 and 2018, that the outline of a subcircular enclosure emerged, with what appears to be a house site sitting at its centre.

The site sits within the townland of Sheshymore and has a quietly tangled bureaucratic history to match its overgrown one. It was originally recorded in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 as a possible cairn, a category normally reserved for prehistoric stone burial mounds, based on field notes compiled by Tom Coffey and Paul Walsh. That provisional classification now looks wide of the mark. What the aerial images suggest instead is a domestic enclosure of the kind found across rural Ireland, a roughly circular boundary surrounding a dwelling, though when this particular house was built or abandoned remains unknown. The northern half of the enclosure is still heavily overgrown, and without excavation or closer survey work, the structure's age and character stay open questions.

What makes this place quietly interesting is less what it is than what it illustrates: the gap between what a landscape appears to be at eye level and what it actually contains. The hazel scrub that defeated the 1997 inspection is still there, and the site remains one of those features that Ireland's upland plateaus conceal with remarkable efficiency, legible only from above, and only then if you know where to look.

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Pete F
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