House - 18th/19th century, Doonflin, Co. Sligo

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House

House – 18th/19th century, Doonflin, Co. Sligo

In a field of gently undulating pasture in Doonflin, County Sligo, the grassed-over outline of a small house lies barely distinguishable from the ground around it.

What remains are sod-covered wall footings, the low ridges of a rectangular two-roomed building measuring roughly four metres east to west and eight metres north to south. It is the kind of trace that is easy to walk across without registering what it once was.

The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the earliest systematic mappings of the Irish landscape, recorded two vernacular houses on this ground. Vernacular here means simply what it sounds like: modest, locally built domestic structures using traditional materials and methods, without the formal design of estate or gentry architecture. By the time the next comparable survey was published in 1913, both houses had vanished from the record. A companion structure sits approximately forty metres to the east, close to a river that runs along the same low ground. The gap between those two map editions spans a period that includes the Great Famine and its aftermath, decades during which countless small rural dwellings across Ireland were abandoned, demolished, or simply fell away. Whether that is the story here, the notes do not say, but the timeline fits a pattern that will be familiar to anyone with knowledge of rural Connacht in the nineteenth century.

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Pete F
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