House - indeterminate date, Turloughgarve, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Turloughgarve, Co. Galway

At Turloughgarve in County Galway, at least four separate structures lie scattered across an old field system, their foundations gradually disappearing back into the ground at different rates.

One is still recognisable as a two-roomed rectangular house. Another has been so thoroughly reclaimed by grass and soil that only the faintest trace of a circular wall survives. Together they suggest not a single episode of settlement but something accumulated, perhaps abandoned and reoccupied, over an unrecorded stretch of time.

The four structures sit in a rough north-south line within the same field system. The southernmost is a circular area roughly eleven metres across, defined by a collapsed drystone wall with what appears to be an entrance on the south-south-east side; it sits about 150 metres to the north-east of a nearby ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland. About 25 metres further north is a second circular form, smaller at nine metres across and far more degraded, its wall little more than a grassed-over ridge. Another 50 metres on is a D-shaped structure, oriented east to west and measuring roughly nine metres by seven, similarly worn down. The final and best-preserved of the group is a rectangular two-roomed house, aligned north to south, about 7.5 metres long and just over four metres wide, with a doorway still visible in the southern wall. The mix of shapes, circular, D-shaped, and rectangular, hints at different periods or traditions of building, though no dates have been established for any of them. What drew people back to this particular stretch of ground, and when they finally left, remains open.

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Pete F
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