House - medieval, Fahee, Co. Clare

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House

House – medieval, Fahee, Co. Clare

In the north corner of a bawn at Fahee in County Clare, one gable of a medieval house rises to roughly seven metres, still carrying the ghost of a large fireplace beneath a relieving stone arch.

A relieving arch is a structural device built above an opening to redirect the weight of masonry around it rather than onto the lintel below, and its survival here, in an otherwise heavily ruined building, gives some sense of the ambition that once shaped this place. The opposite gable, to the south-east, reaches only about three metres and is plain by comparison. Between them, the walls have largely gone, leaving only vestiges of the outer fabric and a single internal dividing wall that separated the rectangular eastern section of the building from a square western section that extended slightly to the south-west.

The structure is L-shaped in plan, measuring sixteen metres on its longer axis and seven metres across, and it appears in that same form on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1842 and 1920, suggesting it had already long since fallen into its current configuration by the time the first systematic mapping of the country was undertaken. Researchers Ua Cróinín and Breen, writing in 1996, identified it as a banquet hall on the basis of its scale and position within the bawn, the bawn being a walled enclosure typically associated with a tower house or fortified residence, designed to protect livestock and provide a defended outer court. The walls themselves are built of undressed mortared field stones, crudely laid rather than finely dressed, which was not unusual for ancillary structures of the medieval period even when they served a significant social function. An inspection carried out in 1999 found the building unchanged from the earlier description, its slow deterioration apparently paused, at least for a time.

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Pete F
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