house

Detached four-bay vernacular house, built c.1800. Pitched roped thatch roof with low rendered chimneystack. Whitewashed rubble limestone walls. Square-headed replacement windows with render sills. Square-headed doorway with replacmement timber door. Small yard to front with low rubble limestone wall to east and west, and outbuilding to south having lean-to corrugated-iron roof and rubble limestone walls. Larger farmyard to east having thatched outbuilding to east side and four-bay vernacular house, now in use as outbuilding, to north side, and having pitched slate roof and rendered walls with square-headed openings having two-over-two pane timber sliding sash windows and timber battened door. Remains of further house to its west, having had pitched roof, with rubble limestone walls and openings with similar details to that of house to east.

This thatched house, one of only two occupied thatched houses left on Árainn, forms a particularly interesting group with the various buildings in the yard to the east comprising a thatched outbuilding, a ruined house and a house now used as an outbuilding. The retention of a roped thatch house to the occupied building places it in the Atlantic coastal vernacular tradition.