House - indeterminate date, Turloughgarve, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
At Turloughgarve in County Galway, a cluster of house foundations sits quietly within an old field system, representing not one settlement but several, each of a different shape and a different degree of survival.
What makes the group unusual is precisely this variety: circular, D-shaped, and rectangular structures occupy the same landscape within a few dozen metres of one another, suggesting occupation across a considerable span of time, though no single date has been pinned to any of them.
The site contains four recorded structures spread across roughly 125 metres of ground. The most substantial is a circular area about eleven metres in diameter, defined by a collapsed drystone wall with what appears to be an entrance facing south-south-east; it sits 150 metres to the north-east of a nearby ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by an earthen bank or stone wall. About 25 metres further north is a second, smaller circular area, nine metres across, now reduced to a low grass-covered wall. Another 50 metres on stands a D-shaped structure, roughly nine metres long and seven metres wide, its walls similarly buried under turf. The fourth structure breaks the pattern entirely: a rectangular two-roomed house, 7.5 metres long and 4.2 metres wide, aligned north to south, with a doorway surviving in its southern wall and described as being in fair condition relative to the others. The shift from circular to rectangular forms broadly mirrors a wider pattern in Irish rural settlement, where earlier rounded structures gradually gave way to the rectilinear buildings more familiar from post-medieval centuries, though without firm dating evidence the sequence here remains a matter of inference rather than certainty.