These are bee-boles, a feature that was once common across Ireland and Britain but is now rarely noticed, often mistaken for niches meant to hold a statue or a lamp. Their purpose was entirely practical. Before the invention of the moveable-frame hive in the nineteenth century, bees were kept in skeps, domed hives woven from straw or coiled grass. Skeps offered no protection from wind or rain on their own, so farmers and estate workers built shallow recesses into south-facing walls to shelter them. The bee-bole was, in effect, a cupboard for a beehive.

Cregganna More sits in County Galway, a county whose landscape of limestone and Atlantic weather made the careful siting of bee skeps a real concern. The tradition of keeping bees in Irish walled gardens and farmsteads goes back centuries, and bee-boles appear in contexts ranging from large estate gardens to modest smallholdings. They tend to survive precisely because they are so unassuming, built into existing stonework and easily overlooked by later generations who had no use for them. The example at Cregganna More represents a quiet piece of agricultural vernacular, a reminder that the management of bees was once an integral and carefully considered part of rural household economy, producing wax for candles and honey as both food and medicine.