House - indeterminate date, Ballymore, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Ballymore, Co. Galway

In Ballymore, County Galway, a house once stood that can no longer be seen.

No wall remains above ground, no earthwork betrays its outline; the only evidence that it ever existed is a mid-twentieth-century record and a single letter, 'C', annotated on a plan. That annotation places it as one of three dwellings clustered within the western half of a rectangular stone fort, a type of enclosure built from dry-stone walling and used in early Irish settlement, though the precise period of occupation here has never been firmly established.

The house was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, in what appears to have been a careful survey of the fort and its interior structures. At the time of recording, the building measured six metres by four point two metres, with double-faced walls, meaning two parallel lines of stone with the gap between them packed with rubble or fill, reaching a width of ninety centimetres. That is a substantial wall for a modest interior, suggesting something built to last, or at least built with the same materials and methods found across centuries of vernacular stone construction in the west of Ireland. Two companion structures were noted nearby within the same enclosure, and together the three suggest the fort's interior was once organised domestic space rather than an empty ceremonial or defensive ground.

What makes this particular structure quietly absorbing is precisely its invisibility. The measurements, the wall construction, the spatial relationship to its neighbours inside the fort, all of it survives only in a published record from over seventy years ago. The ground itself offers nothing. Sites like this act as a reminder that the archaeological landscape is not only what protrudes from the earth but also what has been levelled, robbed for building stone, or simply overtaken by soil and time.

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