House - indeterminate date, Lissadrone, Co. Mayo

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House

House – indeterminate date, Lissadrone, Co. Mayo

At Lissadrone in County Mayo, a low grassy rectangle sits inside an ancient circular enclosure, its walls barely knee-high and almost swallowed by turf.

The outline measures just over ten metres east to west and less than four metres north to south, small enough that you might mistake it for a natural undulation in the ground. It is, in fact, the footprint of a house, its walls built from uncoursed drystone masonry, meaning stones laid without mortar and without any formal patterning, simply stacked as they came to hand.

The building sits within a rath, a type of enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, consisting of a circular area ringed by an earthen bank and, usually, a ditch. Raths were domestic enclosures, most commonly associated with farming families of middling status, and they are among the most numerous monument types surviving in the Irish landscape. This particular house was constructed against the internal face of the rath's eastern bank, its walls projecting inward into the enclosed space. The date of the structure is unresolved; it may be contemporary with the rath itself, or it may represent a later use of the enclosure by someone who found a ready-made boundary and built against it. Without excavation, the sequence cannot be established. What remains is the geometry: a rectangle of grass-covered stone, sitting quietly inside a circle, recording an occupation whose precise moment in time has not yet been recovered.

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Pete F
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