House - indeterminate date, Murrooghtoohy, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
House
In the sand dunes of Murrooghtoohy, about 250 metres from the Atlantic coast and just north of the Caher/Murrough River, there was once a small stone building that the dunes have since swallowed back up entirely.
Excavated in 1968, it was gone from view by the time anyone came to check on it in 1997. The structure existed for a window of roughly three decades as something a visitor could theoretically have stood beside; before that and after that, the sand had the final word.
When the excavator Rynne uncovered it, the building proved to be a carefully considered piece of construction, roughly rectangular and measuring about 8.6 metres along its long axis and 4 metres across, built from local limestone slabs and set into a natural depression in the dune. The walls, surviving to between one and 1.25 metres in height, had their lowest courses set on edge and leaning slightly outward, and the uneven exterior facing suggests the builder was working with the hollow rather than against it. A stone-lined entrance passage, about 2.6 metres long and 1.25 metres wide, projected from the south-south-east wall and was separated from the interior floor by a low sillstone, the kind of raised threshold used to keep water and draught from crossing into a living space. Large jambstones, the upright stones that frame a doorway, flanked at least one side of this entrance. Inside, a transverse wall of upright slabs divided the interior roughly in two, with a gap aligned directly opposite the external entrance. Most intriguingly, a sunken stone-lined trench ran 4.1 metres along the centre of the floor beneath the paving, showing signs of burning at one end and a charcoal deposit at the other, suggesting it functioned as some kind of underfloor flue or heating channel. Two small objects, a perforated bone pin and a needle, were recovered from the site before the formal excavation began and may date to the early medieval period, though the structure itself has not been securely dated.