House - indeterminate date, Ballyglass Middle, Co. Mayo

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House

House – indeterminate date, Ballyglass Middle, Co. Mayo

On the northern slope of a ridge in Ballyglass Middle, County Mayo, a circular earthwork sits in pasture roughly 200 metres from the Roscommon border, and nobody is entirely sure what it is.

It could be the remains of a house. It could equally be a barrow, a burial mound of the kind found scattered across the Irish countryside in various forms. The uncertainty is not unusual for monuments of this kind, but the ambiguity here is particularly neat: depending on which interpretation is correct, this ten-metre platform is either somewhere people once lived or somewhere one of them was eventually laid to rest.

The structure itself is well preserved. A circular bank of stony, gravelly soil defines the perimeter, slightly higher and wider on the southern side than the northern, and inside it the ground dips gently to form what surveyors describe as a saucer-shaped profile, a low internal rim merging almost seamlessly with a sunken interior. An external fosse, a shallow defensive or boundary ditch, was recorded during an inspection in 1978 but has since become difficult to make out on the ground. The platform is now ringed by hazel and hawthorn, which gives it a slightly enclosed character against the open ridge. One hundred metres to the northwest lies a rath, a roughly circular enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, and the house platform, if that is what it is, may once have been associated with it. A second possible house site was recorded about twenty metres to the east, though that one has since been levelled entirely.

The ridge position is telling regardless of function. Views open out to the north and east, while the rising ground to the southeast closes things off. It is the kind of spot that rewards a slow look around once you have found your footing on the slope, the earthwork quiet underfoot, the county boundary close but invisible in the grass.

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Pete F
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