House - indeterminate date, Capnagower, Co. Mayo

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House

House – indeterminate date, Capnagower, Co. Mayo

On the south-western slopes of a hill near the north-eastern end of the Capnagower townland on Clare Island, there is a structure that nobody can quite date or fully explain.

It is called, plainly, a house, though the label raises as many questions as it answers. What remains is a roughly circular footprint, about seven metres across internally, defined by a broad but broken ring of large boulders. Old tillage ridges press in from the western and southern sides, and the views across the eastern part of the island are wide and unobstructed. The setting feels deliberate, whatever the structure once was.

The building has been significantly altered, not by time alone but by human hands. At some point in the past, people working the land by spade robbed the site of its large slabs and dumped smaller stones around the perimeter, probably during field clearances. A revetment is a retaining face of set stone used to hold a wall or bank in place, and this structure originally had both an inner and an outer one. Most of that fabric is now gone or displaced. The best-preserved section lies to the west, where an arc of four large contiguous slabs survives, the southernmost measuring 1.7 metres long and standing up to 0.9 metres high. Elsewhere the remaining slabs lean inward at a noticeable angle, suggesting subsidence or disturbance over a long period. The wall, where traces of both faces survive at the northern side, appears to have been around 1.15 metres thick. No entrance feature is visible anywhere. In the interior, the ground is mostly flat, except for a grassy hollow just south of centre, flanked on its western side by two mossy boulders. Whether that hollow is structural, the result of digging, or simply the work of the ground settling, remains unclear. An unclassified structure of some kind sits roughly fifty metres to the north-east, suggesting this corner of the hillside may once have held more than a single building.

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Pete F
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