House - indeterminate date, Cahermaculick, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
House
Inside a cashel on the edge of Cahermaculick in County Mayo, there is a house that no longer exists in any meaningful sense, and may have been gone before anyone thought to look carefully.
A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval origin, built to protect a farmstead or small settlement. This one contains, or contained, a rectangular structure tucked just inside its south-western wall, a building whose age was never firmly established and whose purpose was never recorded in detail.
When the site was inspected in 1984, the house survived only as a grass-covered outline: wall footings roughly 1.5 metres wide and 0.5 metres high, enclosing a rectangle of approximately seven metres north to south and five metres east to west. It was modest in scale, the kind of dwelling that could belong to almost any century, which is presumably why its date was logged as indeterminate. Lavelle, writing in 1994, recorded a bleaker conclusion, noting that the structure had been levelled during land reclamation. The inspection a decade earlier had caught it in its final form, a faint impression in the grass that agricultural improvement had since erased entirely.