That phrase, dry as it sounds, carries a particular weight here. Slievemore is home to one of the most evocative deserted villages in Ireland, a long street of roofless stone dwellings abandoned during and after the Famine of the 1840s, and the landscape around it is layered with human occupation stretching back thousands of years. To record a building there without being able to pin it to a century is not unusual; it is almost the point.

The mountain and its surroundings have been inhabited, seasonally or permanently, across an extraordinary span of time. Evidence of Neolithic activity, early medieval field systems, and the more recent practice of booleying, whereby farming families moved their livestock to upland pastures in summer and lived in temporary shelters nearby, all overlap on these slopes. A structure that cannot be dated might belong to any of these phases, or to none of them cleanly. The stonework traditions changed slowly, materials were reused, and buildings were sometimes adapted across generations until their original form became difficult to read. Without excavation or documentary evidence, a wall is simply a wall.