House - indeterminate date, Cill Mhuirbhigh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
On the bare limestone of Inis Mór, 130 metres west of the ancient ringfort of Dún Eoghanachta, two conjoined drystone structures sit in a state of pleasing ambiguity.
They are subcircular in plan, built without mortar in the manner common to the Aran Islands, and nobody is entirely certain what they are or when they were built. That uncertainty is itself part of what makes them worth pausing over.
The larger of the two structures runs roughly 9.25 metres north to south and 8.9 metres east to west; the smaller, to its north, measures 5.8 metres by 3.8 metres and may have served as an annexe, with an entrance gap facing south-east. Drystone construction, in which stones are carefully stacked and interlocked without any binding material, has been practised on these islands for millennia, which makes dating by appearance alone unreliable. The walls here bear a close resemblance to the field boundaries that divide up the surrounding limestone plateau, and that likeness is the crux of the problem. The structures could represent a dwelling of some age, or they could be a relatively recent farmhouse and animal pen, built or rebuilt in a tradition that has changed little across the centuries. No date has been established.