Building, Shanaghy, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Utility Structures

Building, Shanaghy, Co. Mayo

On the south-western slope of a low drumlin in County Mayo, a single grass-covered wall is all that survives of what local memory describes as a byre.

A drumlin is a smooth, elongated hill shaped by glacial movement, and this one holds its remnant quietly, in poor pasture, with nothing on the surface to suggest anything worth stopping for.

The remains consist of a stone-built wall running roughly north-east to south-west, about eleven metres long and less than a metre wide, now so thoroughly grassed over that it reads more as a slight ridge than a structure. It is thought to represent the north-western wall of a rectangular building. What makes the site mildly puzzling is its absence from the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1922, suggesting it left no cartographic impression across more than eighty years of mapping. It was only identified as a feature of interest in 1996, when a rectangular outline became visible in an aerial photograph and was added to the Record of Monuments and Places as an earthwork. Local knowledge fills in a little of the human detail, placing a byre here at the beginning of the twentieth century, though nothing in the physical record elaborates further on its use or the people who worked it.

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