House - indeterminate date, Roisín Na Mainiach, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

House

House – indeterminate date, Roisín Na Mainiach, Co. Galway

On a small island in Loch Síodúch in County Galway, a low curving wall traces an arc across the southern ground.

It runs roughly thirteen metres north to south, drystone-built, and the earth inside the curve is raised and uneven in a way that suggests something once stood here. The remains are poor and largely featureless, but the form is consistent with that of a simple hut, the kind of modest shelter that once appeared on islands throughout the west of Ireland, built by people making use of whatever the landscape offered.

What gives the site an additional layer of interest is its proximity to a lake dwelling roughly 150 metres to the north on the same island. Lake dwellings, sometimes known as crannogs, were artificial or partly artificial platforms built out into water, used for habitation from the Bronze Age through to early medieval times and occasionally beyond. Whether the hut remains and the lake dwelling were ever in use at the same time is not recorded, and the date of the hut itself remains unresolved. The pairing of the two features on one small island in a Connemara lough is, at minimum, suggestive of a place that was returned to across time.

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Pete F
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