House - indeterminate date, Dunsoghly, Co. Dublin

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House

House – indeterminate date, Dunsoghly, Co. Dublin

Two square trenched outlines, caught on a single aerial photograph, are almost all that remains to suggest that something once stood east of Dunsoghly Castle in north County Dublin.

The site does not announce itself. There is no earthwork to follow with your eye, no masonry poking through the grass, no interpretive panel. At ground level, it is simply not there.

The evidence comes from one source: an aerial photograph held in the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, reference CUCAP AID57. When Geraldine Stout compiled the record and uploaded it in August 2011, the photograph showed two square trenched areas to the east of Dunsoghly Castle, the late-medieval tower house whose remarkably intact timber roof is itself a rarity in the Irish context. Those trenched outlines, rectangular and regular, are consistent with the footprint of a domestic structure, though no date has been firmly established for whatever building they once defined. Since the photograph was taken, part of the site has been built upon, and the surrounding ground has been disturbed. The record assigns it an indeterminate date, which in archaeological shorthand means the evidence available is insufficient to place it within any particular period with confidence.

Dunsoghly Castle itself is accessible and occasionally open to visitors, sitting just off the road near the townland of Dunsoghly, not far from Dublin Airport. The site of the vanished house lies to its east, though there is nothing for a visitor to locate or examine directly. The value here is of a different kind: knowing that an aerial photograph once revealed something the ground no longer shows is a reminder of how much of the built past has been erased quietly, without drama, by development and soil disturbance rather than by any single decisive event. If you visit the castle and look east across the surrounding ground, you are looking at a place where archaeology existed long enough to be photographed, and was then, in the ordinary course of things, lost.

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