House - medieval, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

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House

House – medieval, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

A low rectangular earthwork sitting in a grazed field in County Limerick might easily be passed off as a trick of the ground, a slight thickening of the pasture over old stone.

But what lies beneath the grass at Cahirguillamore is the remains of a medieval house, part of a settlement so extensive that a nineteenth-century observer, writing in 1896, recorded local tradition describing the whole complex as the foundations of an ancient city of great extent. The site is not marked on Ordnance Survey historic maps, and it sits quietly within what was once the deer park of the Cahir Guillamore demesne, roughly 125 metres west of the townland boundary with Rockbarton.

The house, designated House 2 in the excavation report by Ó Ríordáin and Hunt published in 1942, was the smaller of two closely related structures investigated at the site. Its footprint measured approximately 9.8 metres by 5.6 metres, and it sat immediately to the south of House 1, the two buildings separated by a cobbled passage and a small yard formed in the angle between their walls. The floor was the natural limestone bedrock, levelled in places with dark habitation deposit and pebbles, with a rough stone paving laid over a long central fault in the rock toward the north-eastern end. A number of quern stone fragments, the circular hand-grinding stones used to process grain, had been incorporated into this paving, including part of one that served as the threshold of the doorway. The hearth sat centrally over the same fault, which appeared to have functioned as a sunken hearth until it filled with ash. The walls were built with smaller, less carefully laid stones than those of House 1, and their foundations rested not on bedrock but on an earlier layer of dark habitation soil, which contributed to their partial collapse. A buttress had been added against the south-east corner, possibly in response to movement caused by a bone-filled pit discovered just beneath the wall line. A second, larger pit, over 2.8 metres wide and nearly a metre deep, was found under the cobbled yard, also filled with dark soil and bone.

The monument sits within a wider deserted medieval settlement and an associated field system, both recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record for County Limerick. It is visible as a low earthwork on aerial imagery, including Google Earth images taken as recently as 2018, though it reads far more clearly from the air than from ground level. The land is private pasture, so access would require landowner permission. Those with an interest in the wider landscape might also look for House 1 immediately to the north, and the broader pattern of earthworks that make up what Dowd described with such dramatic flair more than a century ago.

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