House - indeterminate date, Ballymore, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Ballymore, Co. Galway

Beneath the ground at Ballymore in County Galway, a house exists only on paper.

It has walls, or had them, built to a width of 0.9 metres in the double-faced style common to drystone construction, where two outer skins of stone sandwich a rubble core. It measures 8.8 metres by 5.4 metres, a modest but perfectly legible domestic footprint. And yet no visible surface trace of it survives. The ground above it gives nothing away.

What is known comes from a single researcher. McCaffrey, writing in 1952, documented three structures clustered within the western half of a rectangular stone fort at Ballymore, a type of enclosure built from unmortared stone and used across early medieval Ireland for settlement and protection. This particular house was annotated simply as 'A' in McCaffrey's record, one of three buildings that once occupied the interior of that enclosure. The date of construction remains undetermined, a frustratingly common situation for vernacular structures inside Irish stone forts, where the archaeology can be difficult to disentangle and historical documentation is rarely forthcoming. The walls, when recorded, still stood to a height of 0.6 metres, enough to read their form clearly. At some point between that 1952 survey and the present, even that modest remnant disappeared from view.

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Pete F
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