circle would be too small to admit any large animal; but probably goats
would be housed in them easily. In one or two cases I noted that the
stone post forming a jamb to the entrance to the passage between the
round house and the square enclosure was grooved on the inner surface.
This in Dr. Sarmento’s opinion proved that the entrance to the passage
was closed by a lifting hatch of wood, which to some extent confirms the
idea that the back space was intended to shelter animals such as goats,
as a lifting door set in a groove would be much less likely to be forced
by them than a swing door turning, as the house door did, on wooden
pegs.
There are very few instances of party walls being utilised for two
adjoining houses, though the buildings are often only a few inches
apart. Even in the case of the round houses enclosed in square spaces
and touching the square wall, the circular structure is quite complete
at the point of contact. In one instance I measured a large walled
parallelogram fronting on the principal causeway, seventeen yards in
length, enclosing within it one square house of nine yards wide, and two
circular houses, one on each side, the structures in each case being
complete, but the circular walls in this instance merged for a few
inches only at the point of contact with the square outer wall at the
side. Whether these square or outer enclosures were tiled or were merely
enclosed yards it is difficult to say, but that the houses themselves
were so covered is evident from the immense number of well-made red
shards scattered everywhere, and particularly inside the houses, the
tiles being turned up at each end, so that a concave tile to cover over
the joint between them would make a roof covered with them quite
watertight. A door jamb and lintel in one house showed a well-carved
rope moulding, but in most cases they were plain, the lintels and
doorsteps containing, however, at the side a square-cut hollow, in which
a block of wood was apparently inserted to receive the wooden peg or
pivot which formed a sort of hinge for the door, an arrangement still
adopted for the doors of barns, &c., in the neighbourhood; though Dr.
Sarmento was of opinion that no wood was employed in the construction of
the houses themselves, the polished rounded stones fixed to the walls in
some of the houses, which Dr. Hübner considered to be bases of pillars,
being in the opinion of the Portuguese archæologist seats for the
inhabitants.