House - indeterminate date, Buncrowey, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
House
In a field at Buncrowey in County Sligo, a set of stone foundations sits quietly in the northern half of an enclosure, the remains of a rectangular house whose date nobody has been able to pin down.
That uncertainty is itself part of what makes the structure interesting. Without a firm period attached to it, it resists easy categorisation, belonging equally to any number of centuries of rural Irish life.
What survives are the foundations of a building measuring six metres north to south and two and a half metres east to west, a long, narrow footprint typical of vernacular rural structures across Ireland. The walls on the east, south, and west sides are defined by substantial, regularly-shaped stone blocks, suggesting some degree of deliberate construction rather than simple dry-stacking of whatever was to hand. The northern wall is not a separate feature at all; the house simply abuts the enclosure wall that surrounds it, borrowing that boundary as its own rear wall. An enclosure of this kind is a roughly circular or rectilinear walled area that would historically have served a farmstead, providing shelter and security for people and animals alike. The entrance into the house, one metre wide, sits off-centre in the south wall, a small asymmetry that gives the plan a slightly informal, functional quality, as though it was built to suit a particular habit or convenience rather than any strict geometry.