Building, Cahererillan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Utility Structures
Within the north-eastern corner of the cashel at Cahererillan, a barely visible arrangement of foundation lines traces the outline of a building that was still standing, still roofed, when the first Ordnance Survey mapped this part of County Galway in 1838.
A cashel is a stone ringfort, typically a roughly circular enclosure bounded by a dry-stone wall, and here that enclosing wall was pressed into service as the rear wall of the structure. The eastern and western walls of the building abut it rather than bonding into it, a detail that tells you something about how the building came to be: it was inserted against an existing boundary rather than planned as part of one.
What survives today amounts to foundation lines roughly a metre wide, describing a footprint thirteen metres long and seven metres across, aligned on a north-west to south-east axis. Between the 1838 survey and the present, the building passed from a roofed structure into rubble and then into these faint traces. The relationship between the building and the much older cashel enclosure is not fully resolved; whether the structure was a later farmbuilding making opportunistic use of an ancient wall, or something with a closer connection to the original settlement, the foundations alone cannot say.