House - indeterminate date, Carrowneden, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
House
In a pasture at Carrowneden in County Mayo, a low circular bank sits so quietly in the landscape that the Ordnance Survey never once recorded it, across any edition of their six-inch maps.
That omission is itself a clue to how ambiguous this feature is: a ring of sod-covered stones, barely knee-high in places, whose origins and date remain entirely unresolved.
What survives is a roughly circular area, approximately eight to eight and a half metres across on its north-south axis and around seven and a half metres east to west, defined by a low stony bank somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 metres wide and only 20 to 30 centimetres tall. A later straight field wall cuts across the eastern side on a northeast-southwest axis, truncating whatever original form the structure had. The interior sits slightly lower than the surrounding ground, a subtle but telling detail. That gentle depression, combined with the circular plan, raises the possibility that this was once a circular house, the kind of simple rounded dwelling that appears throughout Irish prehistory and the early medieval period. About 50 metres to the southeast lies a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period, which may or may not be coincidental to this structure's location. The relationship between the two features, if any exists, is unknown. The whole thing is now largely engulfed in a thicket of blackthorn, which makes close inspection difficult and lends the spot an air of active resistance to scrutiny.