Building, Cahermacon, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Utility Structures
Between a roofed working building and a collapsed ruin, this structure at Cahermacon in County Clare passed through its entire functional life within the span of a single Ordnance Survey cycle.
In 1840, when the first edition of the six-inch map recorded the site, it appeared as a roofed rectangular building sitting on the northern half of a natural platform. By 1916, the same mapping programme showed it already unroofed and ruinous, a quiet collapse that left only low walls and an outline.
The building occupies a distinctive geological feature, a roughly rectangular natural platform measuring some 66 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, which slopes gently southward. The structure itself is modest in scale, with internal dimensions of approximately 9 metres by 5.9 metres, and its walls, between 0.7 and 0.8 metres thick, are built from crudely dressed stone set in mortar. Risteárd Ua Cróinín and Martin Breen, who examined the site for their unpublished survey of the castles and tower-houses of County Clare, dated the masonry style to the late medieval period, though no carved or moulded architectural features survive to sharpen that attribution. The north wall is the best preserved section, standing up to 1.2 metres at its north-west corner, while of the east and west walls only the inner faces remain visible. Immediately to the north lies a second, smaller building, and the platform itself may have been adapted as a bawn, an enclosing defensive wall or yard typically associated with late-medieval tower-houses, which would suggest the whole complex once formed part of a more substantial fortified arrangement.
