House - indeterminate date, Cross, Co. Mayo

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House – indeterminate date, Cross, Co. Mayo

In a pasture field near Cross in County Mayo, a low rectangular outline in the grass marks the ghost of a house whose age nobody has yet been able to determine.

The wall footings, grass-covered and subsiding, describe a room roughly seven metres from east to west and four metres from north to south. The western side has disappeared altogether, absorbed into a field boundary that runs along the eastern edge of a nearby laneway, so what survives is essentially three sides of a very modest enclosure, open on the fourth.

What makes this particular remnant quietly interesting is its context. It sits at the tip of a low east-to-west ridge, in the south-west corner of a field, and it is not alone. Two further house sites lie close by to the north, all three sharing the same east-to-west orientation and arranged in a neat parallel row. Roughly forty metres to the east stands a ringfort, the circular enclosure type, defined by earthen banks, that was the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. Whether the houses predate, postdate, or are entirely unrelated to that ringfort is not recorded. When the site was surveyed in 1986, no dating evidence was recovered, and the designation remains exactly what it sounds like: indeterminate. The grouping of three houses with matching orientations in such close proximity does suggest a deliberate arrangement rather than accidental survival, though what kind of community or period produced it remains an open question.

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Pete F
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