House - 18th/19th century, Teermulmoney, Co. Clare

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House

House – 18th/19th century, Teermulmoney, Co. Clare

At Teermulmoney in County Clare, a ruined rectangular house sits not beside an ancient stone enclosure but inside one, its walls partly built from the very structure it inhabits.

The relationship between the two is quietly unsettling: whoever raised this house in the 18th or 19th century did not simply choose a convenient patch of ground. They worked within the circuit of a cashel, a type of early medieval dry-stone enclosure typically associated with a farmstead or settlement, and they quarried that older structure to do it.

The house is modest in its dimensions, roughly 14.8 metres east to west and 5.7 metres north to south, and it was laid out so that its eastern end aligns precisely with the outer face of the cashel wall. That eastern wall, along with the western gable, survives in the best condition today, the western gable still standing to around 1.3 metres. The walls are about 0.8 metres thick. No windows or doors remain recognisable in the surviving fabric, which makes it difficult to read the building as a domestic space at all. What survives reads less like a house and more like a boundary, a geometry pressed into an older geometry. The reuse of cashel stone in the construction suggests a pragmatic attitude to what surrounded the builder, or perhaps simply a shortage of other material close to hand. Either way, the earlier enclosure was partially dismantled to raise the later walls, folding centuries of separate occupation into the same rubble.

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Pete F
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