House - indeterminate date, Carrowcrom, Co. Mayo

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House

House – indeterminate date, Carrowcrom, Co. Mayo

In the south half of a rath at Carrowcrom in County Mayo, the faint outline of a rectangular structure sits slightly sunken into the ground, its walls reduced to little more than sod-covered stone footings and the ghost of a dividing line.

A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a ringfort, one of the circular earthen enclosures that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands and were typically used as enclosed farmsteads from the early medieval period onward. That this building occupies the interior of one places it within a long tradition of domestic life sheltering behind such boundaries, though precisely when anyone lived here remains unknown.

What survives is a rectangle measuring roughly 7.4 metres north to south and about 9 metres east to west. The western and northern walls are the best preserved, defined by stone bank footings somewhere between 1.8 and 2.2 metres wide, standing only half a metre in internal height and slightly less on the exterior face. There are slight returns, meaning short inward turns of the wall at the corners, at the eastern end of the north wall and the southern end of the west wall, which suggest the building did once have four proper sides, even if the eastern and southern walls have now all but vanished into the ground. Most intriguing is a barely discernible low line of stones running east to west through the centre of the interior, dividing the space lengthways into two narrow rooms or zones. Four metres to the west of the structure, an opening leads into a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind frequently found in association with raths, used for storage or concealment. The relationship between the house and that underground feature, whether they were in use simultaneously or belong to different phases of activity within the rath, is something the surviving remains cannot answer.

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Pete F
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