House - indeterminate date, Ballynastaig, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
At Ballynastaig in County Galway, there is a structure that exists now only as a reference in an old report.
A circular house site, roughly 8.5 metres across, was recorded in 1952 by McCaffrey inside the enclosure of a cashel, the dry-stone walled ringfort type common across the west of Ireland. By the time anyone looked again, nothing remained on the surface. The house had effectively vanished, leaving behind only a note on a page.
What McCaffrey documented in 1952 would have been a modest domestic building typical of early medieval Ireland, circular in plan and set within the protection of the cashel's stone wall. The cashel itself survives as a separate recorded monument. What does not survive is any visible trace of the house inside it. Also within the northern sector of the same enclosure lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was typically used in early medieval contexts for storage or refuge. That underground feature persists while the house above ground does not, which is a quiet reversal of how things usually go. Stone walls tend to outlast the spaces people actually lived in, but here the subterranean element has proved more durable than the surface structure it once served.