Settlement deserted - medieval, Conlanstown, Co. Kildare

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Settlement deserted – medieval, Conlanstown, Co. Kildare

Locals still call it 'the town meadow', which is perhaps the most telling detail about a patch of pasture on the lower slopes of Grange Hill in County Kildare. There was, at some point in the medieval period, a settlement here, and the name has quietly preserved that memory long after the walls came down and the fields grew over. What remains is subtle to the point of near-invisibility: grassed-over stony spreads, low earthen banks, faint scarps, and slight hollows in the ground that, taken together, describe a small but coherent human world.

The complex covers a roughly rectangular area of around 250 metres east to west and 200 metres north to south on a moderately steep, north-west-facing slope at an elevation of 743 feet. At its core are two buildings. The larger is a rectangular house, about 10.8 metres long and 6.5 metres wide, its walls now reduced to broad stony spreads still rising to nearly a metre on the interior. A collapsed internal partition wall, running north to south, hints at a division of domestic space. Immediately to the south-west sits a smaller, square structure, just four metres a side, open on its northern face, perhaps an outhouse or store. These two buildings occupy the north-east corner of a large square field, roughly 60 by 60 metres, bounded by a combination of low earthen banks and upslope scarps. A scarp, in this context, is simply a short, abrupt slope in the ground left where soil was cut away or built up to mark a boundary. West of this main field lies a narrower rectangular enclosure, and beyond that, two possible sunken ways, the hollowed lanes that once connected parts of the settlement to each other or to the wider landscape. The longer of these two trackways can be traced for around 180 metres and forms the western limit of the whole complex. Shallow fosses, the slight drainage ditches that edge some of the field banks, survive in places, as does a later depression that cuts awkwardly across one of the field boundaries, suggesting the land was used in some way even after the settlement itself had gone.

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