House - medieval, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

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House – medieval, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in the pasture at Cahirguillamore, County Limerick, a medieval house has been quietly dissolving into the ground for centuries, so thoroughly that even the Ordnance Survey never recorded it.

What remains is barely readable to the naked eye: grass-covered banks where walls once stood, and the occasional facing stone surfacing through the turf like something reluctant to be forgotten entirely. It is the kind of site that rewards patience and a certain tolerance for ambiguity, since nobody is entirely certain it is there at all.

The identification came in 1942, when archaeologists Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and John Hunt surveyed the broader Cahirguillamore complex and noted, with careful hedging, that they suspected the existence of houses in several parts of the site. Their description is worth quoting directly: the structures appeared as rectangular outlines with low walls, the facing stones appearing through the turf in places, and the collapsed material forming grass-covered banks. The site lies in what was once a deer park attached to the demesne of Cahir Guillamore House, a setting that places it within a layered medieval landscape. A ringfort sits immediately to the west, a castle site lies roughly 100 metres to the north-east, and a deserted medieval settlement is recorded around 250 metres to the north. Whatever domestic life once took place here, it did so in close proximity to the full range of medieval settlement types, from defended enclosures to probable lordly residences. Aerial orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2012, and again in September 2020, suggest that a curvilinear bank to the south-west of the adjacent ringfort may correspond to the remains Ó Ríordáin and Hunt described.

The site sits roughly 40 metres west of the avenue leading to Cahir Guillamore House, in pastureland, and access would depend on landowner permission. Because the remains are so slight, the best conditions for reading the ground are a low winter sun or the kind of raking light that occurs in early morning or late afternoon, when shadows catch even shallow earthworks. Anyone visiting should also look towards the ringfort to the west, since the two features are closely related spatially, and the broader cluster of monuments in this corner of Limerick gives the faint grassy banks here considerably more meaning than they would have in isolation.

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