House - indeterminate date, Creggymulgreny, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
At Creggymulgreny in County Galway, there is a house that exists only on paper.
No walls rise from the ground, no outline is visible in the grass, and a visitor standing on the spot would have no particular reason to pause. Yet the record of it persists, a rectangular structure roughly fifteen metres by five and a half, noted and sketched by a surveyor in 1952 and since swallowed entirely by the landscape.
What McCaffrey recorded in 1952 was a house site pressed against the inner face of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone enclosure common across the west of Ireland, typically circular and defined by a substantial dry-stone boundary wall. The house occupied the northern sector of the cashel's interior, its long wall abutting the enclosure itself. McCaffrey's sketch plan also captured a later intrusion: a north-south field wall, running across the monument and effectively cutting it in two, which speaks to the way working farmland has repeatedly overwritten earlier occupation in this part of Connacht. The house walls he measured were modest, roughly ninety centimetres wide and only thirty centimetres proud of the ground even then. At some point after that survey, the last traces disappeared altogether.