Flower Hill House, Bouluskeagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
In the townland of Bouluskeagh, in County Galway, there is a house with a name that sounds more like a Victorian watercolour than a rural Irish address.
Flower Hill House carries that particular quality of quiet anonymity that clings to certain country houses, the kind that appear on older maps and in estate records but have slipped, for the moment, beyond easy reach of the documented record.
The source material for this site has not yet been made fully available through the usual channels of the national monument record, which places it in an interesting category: known, catalogued by name and location, but not yet described. This is not as unusual as it might seem. Ireland's archaeological and architectural survey is an ongoing process, and many hundreds of sites, from modest vernacular houses to more elaborate country residences, exist in this provisional state, acknowledged but not yet fully accounted for. Bouluskeagh itself is a small rural townland, and Flower Hill House takes its name from the gentle topographic tradition of naming a dwelling for the land it sits on, or the land as its owner wished to imagine it.
Until more detailed records are made available, the house remains one of those intriguing lacunae in the landscape, a named place waiting for its story to be properly told.
