Building, Fortane More, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Utility Structures

Building, Fortane More, Co. Clare

Nine metres to the north-west of a tower house in County Clare, a long rectangular outline sits almost flush with the ground.

Wall foundations, surviving to no more than half a metre in height, trace the full perimeter of a building that once measured roughly twenty-two and a half metres by just over eleven metres on the outside. That is a substantial footprint, large enough to suggest something more purposeful than a simple outbuilding, yet the structure has attracted little attention beyond the quiet work of surveyors.

The walls are built in a manner common to late medieval construction in the region: an inner and an outer kerbing of stones with a rubble core between them, the whole running to about 1.2 metres in width where it is best preserved at the south-east corner. An entrance gap nearly three metres wide opens in the northern half of the north-west wall, which is otherwise the better-preserved side of the structure. The north-east wall, by contrast, has collapsed almost entirely into rubble. Field banks extend north-east from the north-west wall, with a second bank meeting it at right angles, suggesting the building once sat within a managed or enclosed landscape rather than open ground. The proximity to the Fortane More tower house, a fortified residential tower of the kind built by Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords across Ireland from the fourteenth century onwards, points strongly to a functional relationship between the two. Both structures appear to have drawn on the same locally quarried stone. About twenty metres to the west, a natural platform measuring thirteen by eight metres could have served as a house platform, adding another possible layer to what was once a small but organised complex of buildings and enclosures on this low-lying Clare terrain.

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Pete F
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