House - medieval, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

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House

House – medieval, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

On the summit of Bailey Mór, a large mound on the island of Inis Gé Thuaidh off the coast of County Mayo, there is a medieval house that no longer looks like a house at all.

Its outline has vanished entirely, leaving nothing visible at ground level. What survives, if survival is the right word, is a legally protected national monument occupying a patch of hillside where stones and collapsed slabs once told a more legible story.

The scholar Françoise Henry visited Inis Gé Thuaidh in the late 1930s and recorded what she found on the mound: a large heap of stones and slabs that she interpreted as the remains of a cluster of collapsed houses. In her 1945 publication she catalogued them individually, designating this structure House E, the southernmost of the group. Two further houses stood immediately to its north, forming what appears to have been a small domestic cluster rather than an isolated building. Henry's careful identification of the site fixed it in the record, though the physical evidence she described has since become unreadable at the surface. The mound itself, Bailey Mór, adds another layer of complexity; a bailey in medieval usage refers to the outer enclosure of a fortified site, suggesting the broader landscape here was already one of organised, deliberate settlement before these houses were built or occupied.

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