Structure, Slievemore, Co. Mayo

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Utility Structures

Structure, Slievemore, Co. Mayo

On the northern slopes of Slievemore, the great quartzite mountain that dominates Achill Island in County Mayo, something stands that has not yet been fully accounted for.

It is catalogued, given a record number, assigned to a place, and then, for now, left largely undescribed. The structure sits in a landscape already crowded with the extraordinary: a deserted village of stone cottages stretching along the mountain's lower flank, megalithic tombs dating back thousands of years, and the quiet evidence of human presence that spans from the Neolithic to the nineteenth century.

Slievemore itself rises to around 671 metres and has long attracted archaeological attention precisely because its slopes were never heavily modernised or built over. The deserted village nearby, used seasonally under a practice known as booleying, where communities moved their livestock to upland grazing in summer, preserves a remarkable density of vernacular architecture and field systems. The mountain and its surroundings have yielded court tombs, standing stones, and enclosures from multiple periods, meaning that an unspecified structure in this townland could belong to almost any era. Without further detail, the honest position is that this particular site remains, for the moment, a shape on a hillside with a number but not yet a full story.

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Pete F
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