That silence is itself telling. Rural Mayo is scattered with the remains of houses from this period, many of them relics of a landscape convulsed by clearance, famine, and emigration, structures that were built, occupied, and eventually abandoned within the span of a few generations.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in rural Connacht were a time of profound upheaval. Houses of this era range from modest single-storey vernacular dwellings, built with local stone and thatched or slated roofs, to more substantial farmhouses reflecting the modest prosperity of middling tenants or small landowners. The fact that a structure in Bellanasally has been formally recorded as a monument suggests it retains enough physical fabric to be considered of archaeological or architectural interest, even if the details of who built it, who lived there, and what became of them remain, for now, unrecorded.