Ballyconnoe House (in ruins), Ballyconnoe, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
House
On the Burren plateau in County Clare, a single fragment of north wall is almost all that remains of a house that once gave its name to an entire townland.
The wall runs ten metres in length, stands two metres high, and is built of roughly dressed stone. At its centre is a partly blocked opening; on its southern face, a lintelled recess. A grassed-over mound of rubble spreads immediately to the south, and a window sillstone protruding from the ground at the mound's edge hints at something more substantial that has since collapsed back into the limestone landscape. Beside this, a possible bawn, the walled enclosure typically built to protect a lord's house and livestock, lies just to the south, with several other ruined structures and a likely road or trackway close by, suggesting this was once a small organised settlement rather than a solitary dwelling.
The place is tied by local tradition to the O'Connoe family, also recorded as O'Conway More or, in a 1459 Irish text called the Caithreim Thoirdhealbhaigh (the Wars of Torlogh O'Brien, written by John, son of Rory McGrath), as O'Conduibh. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of the great mapping project that produced the 1842 six-inch map, note that the family after whom the townland was named "used to hold a market near this house while he flourished." That detail, passed down through oral tradition, places the site at the centre of a small but functioning local economy. By 1842 the house was already marked as being in ruins, and Robinson's map of 1977 labels it in Irish as Cabhail Bhaile Uí Connúdh, roughly the ruin of the townland of the O'Connúdh. The site sits within a multiperiod field system on the plateau, meaning the landscape around it bears traces of human activity from several different eras, though the house itself is difficult to date precisely; it may be post-medieval rather than medieval in origin, despite its classification.
The wall stands in open pasture at the south-eastern edge of an escarpment, exposed to the wide Burren sky. The site is understated to the point of near-invisibility, which is part of what makes it worth pausing over: a single rough wall, a blocked doorway, and a grassy mound are the only physical evidence of a family prominent enough to name a townland and busy enough to run a market.