House - indeterminate date, Ballymabilla, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Ballymabilla, Co. Galway

In the level marshy grassland of Ballymabilla, Co. Galway, a cluster of ancient structures sits so thoroughly dissolved into the ground that only a trained eye would register them at all.

Quarrying has erased much of the site, and what remains is largely a matter of low, grassed-over humps and subtle scarps. Yet beneath that agricultural ordinariness lies what survives of a cashel, a type of early stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement, roughly thirty metres in diameter, its drystone boundary wall now collapsed and largely invisible except along an arc running from the north-east through south to west-south-west.

At the centre of this enclosure stands the most legible element of the complex: a rectangular house, oriented roughly east-south-east to west-north-west, measuring fourteen metres long and six metres wide. Its low drystone walls retain opposing doorways on the north-east and south-west sides, and traces of an internal division suggest the building was subdivided, perhaps separating living space from storage or animal quarters. Immediately to its west lies what is probably a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of a kind commonly associated with early Irish settlements, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. Two low banks radiate outward from the house to the north-west and south, and roughly nine and a half metres to the north sits a small L-shaped structure, only three metres by two, which may be the remnant of a second house. A further structure identified as another house lies about forty metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this was once something closer to a small settlement than a single farmstead.

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Pete F
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