For something like two thousand years, a certain kind of Irish family did not build their house on land. They built the land first.
A crannog is an artificial island, made by piling stone, brushwood, peat and timber onto a lake bed until it broke the surface, then ringing it with a palisade of driven posts and woven hazel. On top went a house, sometimes more than one, with a workshop, a hearth and room for a few animals. Access was by logboat, or by a narrow causeway built deliberately crooked and sometimes sunk just below the waterline, so that only people who already knew the way could cross it.
Hundreds have been identified across Ireland including Ulster. They were built from the Bronze Age onward, boomed in the early medieval period, and some were still occupied into the seventeenth century. That is a building technique with a working life of roughly two thousand years.
The appeal is obvious once you think about it. Water is a better wall than stone, it needs no maintenance, and anyone coming at you has to do it slowly, in the open, in single file.
They are also superb for archaeology. Waterlogged, airless mud preserves wood, leather and textile that would have rotted away to nothing on dry land.
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