Structure, Moneensauran, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Utility Structures

Structure, Moneensauran, Co. Cavan

In the townland of Moneensauran in County Cavan, a small stone structure sits with an identity problem.

Locally it is known as a duck house, which is an endearingly practical name for something that has attracted enough archaeological attention to end up formally catalogued. The gap between folk memory and official record is often where the most interesting questions live.

The structure is subrectangular in plan, its interior measuring roughly 5.3 metres on its longer axis and only 1.7 metres across, making it a notably narrow space by any reckoning. The walls are drystone, meaning they are built without mortar, the stones carefully chosen and stacked to hold their own weight, and they are described as thick. The roof appears to be made of flat slabs rather than corbelled or vaulted stone, which keeps the whole thing low and solid. The entrance, set into the northeast wall, is just 0.4 metres wide and 0.6 metres high, a genuinely small opening that requires stooping or crawling to pass through, and it is capped by three substantial lintels. That combination, a cramped entrance, thick drystone walls, and a flat slab roof, could describe a range of rural building types across Ireland, from animal shelters to storage structures to something older and harder to classify. The duck house name suggests the building was used, or at least understood, as a practical enclosure for fowl at some point in living memory, but the archaeological inventory that brought it to wider attention stops short of confirming that origin or assigning it a definitive date.

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Pete F
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