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

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House

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

At Magheraghanrush in County Sligo, a rectangular outline in the ground is all that remains of a house that once held three rooms and the daily routines of whoever lived there.

The walls have long since collapsed or been removed, but the drystone footings, built from rubble limestone and now covered by a skin of earth, still trace the full plan of the building with enough clarity that each room can be measured and each doorway located. It is the kind of site that repays slow looking: not dramatic, not ruined in any photogenic sense, just quietly legible.

The structure runs roughly southeast to northwest and measures approximately 22 metres along its length and 6 metres across, a proportions typical of vernacular domestic building in the post-1700 period in the west of Ireland. The three rooms are arranged in a row, with the central room entered from the northeast wall and the two flanking rooms accessed from breaks in the southwest end of their dividing walls. The footings themselves survive to only 20 to 40 centimetres in internal height, the limestone rubble spread to between one and 1.3 metres in thickness, earth pressing them low. Small piles of rubble survive inside the western and southeastern rooms, likely remnants of collapsed upper wall material or perhaps the last traces of hearth surrounds or internal fittings. The interior floor level sits slightly below the ground outside on the northeast side, a detail that hints at the gentle slope of the original ground surface and the modest earthwork involved in levelling the floor.

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Pete F
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