House - indeterminate date, Carrowmore, Co. Mayo

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House

House – indeterminate date, Carrowmore, Co. Mayo

A small rise in undulating pasture at Carrowmore in County Mayo has spent decades being quietly misread.

For most of the twentieth century, the circular earthwork sitting atop this low prominence was mapped and catalogued as a mound, the kind of designation that tends to close off further questions rather than open them. It took a herd of cattle to prompt a rethink.

The feature does not appear on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map at all, which is itself worth noting, since that survey was generally thorough. By 1929 it had been recorded as a small circular hachured feature, and when the Ballinrobe Archaeological Survey visited in 1989, the description was straightforward: a raised circular area of earth and stone, roughly 8.6 metres north to south and 7.6 metres east to west, standing about a metre high, with trees growing in its interior. That account, published by Lavelle in 1994, fed into the Record of Monuments and Places classification of 1997, which logged it simply as a mound. Then, during an inspection in 2018, farm stock had eroded the grass cover sufficiently to expose something that had not been visible before: a low, double-faced straight wall on the southern side, averaging about 1.1 metres in width. A double-faced wall, two parallel stone faces with fill between them, is a construction technique associated with domestic and enclosure structures rather than with burial or ritual mounds. That detail shifted the interpretation entirely, and the monument is now considered a possible house remains, though its date remains undetermined. Fifty-five metres to the east sits a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, which lends the immediate landscape a character that is more residential than funerary.

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Pete F
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