House - indeterminate date, Cloonamore, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Cloonamore, Co. Galway

On the north-eastern shore of Inishbofin, tucked between two promontories and close to the water's edge, a small oval outline in the ground marks what was once a dwelling of some kind.

The structure is modest almost to the point of invisibility: a subcircular area roughly four metres long and two and a half metres wide, its outline traced by a line of drystone walling, the kind of construction where stones are laid without mortar, relying on weight and careful placement alone. It sits within a wider pattern of field walls, suggesting it was part of a working agricultural or pastoral landscape rather than an isolated shelter.

The date of the structure is genuinely unknown. No artefacts, documentary references, or architectural details have been recorded that would place it in any particular century. It could belong to the post-medieval period of small tenant farming, or it could be considerably older. What is known is that it does not stand alone: a second hut of similar character lies approximately 150 metres to the north-west, hinting that this corner of Inishbofin once supported a small cluster of habitation, however temporary or seasonal that might have been. Inishbofin, an island off the Connemara coast in County Galway, has a long and layered human past, and structures like these, unspectacular and unrecorded in written history, are often the only physical trace of the people who worked its land and fished its waters.

The site had not been physically visited at the time it was recorded, so the description relies on information passed on by M. Gibbons rather than direct archaeological inspection. That alone gives it a slightly provisional quality, a place noted on the map but not yet fully accounted for.

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Pete F
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