House - indeterminate date, Derryronan, Co. Mayo

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House – indeterminate date, Derryronan, Co. Mayo

In the interior of a rath at Derryronan in County Mayo, a rough circle of stones about the width of a modest sitting room may or may not be the remains of a house.

That uncertainty is the whole point. The feature, roughly 5.7 metres in diameter, sits slightly east of centre within the enclosure, and its western arc preserves what could be the footings of a curved stone wall, about 0.8 metres wide. Two further lines of stone radiate outward from it, one to the northwest and one to the northeast, each reaching toward the inner edge of the enclosing earthwork. Together, they suggest a small round structure that once connected to the boundary of the rath itself.

A rath, also called a ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and used as a defended homestead for a farming family. Finding a possible house inside one is entirely expected; what makes Derryronan interesting is how stubbornly ambiguous the evidence remains. Hazel scrub partially covers the stone concentration, making it genuinely difficult to examine, and there is a real possibility that what looks like a house plan is simply a pile of stones cleared from a field at some later date and dumped inside the rath, where the ground was already disturbed. The question has not been resolved, and the site carries no date, indeterminate being the honest answer when the stones themselves will not say.

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Pete F
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