House - indeterminate date, Barnacahoge, Co. Mayo

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House – indeterminate date, Barnacahoge, Co. Mayo

Inside the enclosing stone wall of a cashel at Barnacahoge in County Mayo, at the very centre of the space, sits a small square structure that nobody has been able to fully explain.

A cashel is a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, and examples across Ireland often contain traces of the buildings that once stood inside them. This one does, after a fashion, though what exactly the structure was remains genuinely unclear.

The little building is of rough drystone construction, the kind of dry-laid stonework assembled without mortar. It appears originally to have measured roughly two metres by two metres, standing about a metre in height, though it has partly collapsed and now spreads across a diameter of around three metres. A local source suggested the cashel interior contained house sites, and this structure was recorded in response to that account, but nothing about it convincingly supports that interpretation. Its function is uncertain, and it is thought to be of relatively recent date rather than early medieval origin. No other structures within the cashel resemble a house.

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Pete F
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