Crannog, Mahanagh, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

Crannog, Mahanagh, Co. Galway

Along the east bank of the Grange River in Mahanagh, County Galway, there is a place that appears on a 1930 Ordnance Survey map as a distinct oval mound and nowhere else.

No earthwork rises from the ground today, no stones break the surface, and nothing visible marks the spot as anything other than ordinary riverside land. What the map recorded was almost certainly a crannog, an artificial or partially artificial island built out into a lake or wetland, typically constructed during the early medieval period as a defensible dwelling place for a family or small community. The fact that it can now be found only in cartographic form makes it a curiously spectral presence in the landscape.

The 1930 survey recorded the mound's dimensions with some precision: roughly 30 metres along a northwest to southeast axis and about 20 metres across from east to west. That oval footprint is consistent with the typical form of an Irish crannog, structures that were usually built up from layers of timber, peat, brush, and stone, sometimes ringed with a wooden palisade, and used from the Bronze Age through to the seventeenth century. By the time surveyors returned to assess it for the archaeological inventory of North Galway, no surface traces remained. Whether the mound was disturbed, flooded, or simply subsumed into the soft ground beside the river, the record does not say.

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Pete F
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