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

Co. Sligo |

House

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

In a quiet stretch of pasture in Doonflin, County Sligo, a low rectangle of sod-covered stone traces the outline of a house that was already gone by the early twentieth century.

The wall footings measure twenty-three metres east to west and just four metres north to south, subdivided internally into four rooms. It is a narrow, elongated plan, typical of vernacular rural housing, the kind of proportions that made the most of available materials and kept interiors manageable to heat.

The house appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which makes it one of the earliest systematic cartographic records of the Irish countryside and an invaluable baseline for tracking what has since disappeared. By the time the 1913 edition of the same map was produced, this structure, along with a near-identical companion house located roughly forty metres to the west, had been omitted entirely. Whether this reflects demolition, abandonment, or simply the gradual dissolution of walls into the surrounding ground is not recorded, but the gap between the two map editions spans a period that includes the aftermath of the Famine and the slow depopulation of many rural townlands across Connacht. The site sits in gently rolling pasture with a natural fall of ground towards a river about fifty metres to the east, a positioning that would have made practical sense for a working household needing access to water.

The two houses together, separated by only forty metres, suggest this was once a small cluster of habitation rather than a single isolated dwelling. What remains is now barely legible as architecture, more a thickening of the grass than a ruin in any conventional sense, which is part of what makes sites like this easy to walk past without registering what they once were.

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Pete F
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