House - medieval, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

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House

House – medieval, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

Somewhere beneath a grazed pasture in County Limerick, the outlines of medieval houses lie pressed into the soil, invisible at ground level but legible from the air as rectangular cropmarks.

This is not a site with a visitor centre or an interpretive panel. There is no upstanding masonry, no obvious feature to catch the eye of someone walking the field. What exists here is essentially a ghost, one that only becomes coherent when viewed from above, where the differential growth of grass over buried walls and floors betrays the shapes of rooms and enclosures that have otherwise vanished entirely from the landscape.

The site sits on what was once the deer park of the Cahirguillamore demesne, about 100 metres west of the avenue leading to Cahirguillamore House. It forms part of a broader deserted medieval settlement, a term archaeologists use for villages or clusters of dwellings that were abandoned at some point in the medieval or post-medieval period, leaving only earthworks or subsurface traces behind. The archaeologists Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and John Hunt examined the wider Cahirguillamore complex in 1942 and noted a main group of around a dozen houses to the north of a ringfort, which is itself still visible immediately to the south of this particular site. A ringfort, for context, is a circular enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, though here it sits embedded within a later medieval landscape. Ó Ríordáin and Hunt observed that the houses were associated with small square or rectangular enclosures, which they interpreted as yards or gardens. The specific house or houses recorded here measure approximately 5 metres north to south and 11 metres east to west, aligned on an east to west axis. They do not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and their identification rests entirely on aerial evidence, including orthoimages captured between 2005 and 2012 and a Digital Globe image from September 2020.

Because the remains are entirely subsurface, there is little to see in the conventional sense without access to aerial imagery. The site lies within a working pasture, so land access would require the landowner's permission. Cropmarks of this kind tend to show most clearly during dry summers, when moisture stress causes grass above buried features to behave differently from surrounding growth. Anyone with a serious interest in the wider Cahirguillamore complex would do well to read the 1942 paper by Ó Ríordáin and Hunt alongside consulting the National Monuments Service database entries, which map out the full spread of the settlement, the field system, the ringfort, and the two previously excavated medieval houses nearby.

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