House - indeterminate date, Mulroog, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
At Mulroog in County Galway, inside the enclosure of a cashel, a circular mound was once recorded that may or may not still exist.
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, typically of early medieval date, and they are common enough across Ireland; what is less common is a structure within one that seems to have quietly vanished between one generation of observers and the next.
In 1952, a researcher named McCaffrey documented a circular mound roughly ten metres in diameter, positioned about six and a half metres from the cashel's western interior wall. He described it cautiously as "probably a ruined hut site", which in archaeological terms would suggest the collapsed remains of a small stone or earthen dwelling, perhaps contemporary with the cashel itself. When the site was inspected again in November 1982, however, the feature was not noted at all. Whether it had been obscured by vegetation, disturbed in the intervening decades, or simply missed on that particular visit, the record does not say. The mound sits, or sat, in an indeterminate state: recorded once, absent the next time anyone looked.
