House - indeterminate date, Inis Gé Theas, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
House
On the southern edge of Inis Gé Theas, a small island off the Mayo coast, a cluster of stone slabs sits in a wind-scoured hollow in the machair, the low-lying grassland that spreads westward across much of the island.
The hollow lies roughly 0.7 to 1 metre below the surrounding ground level, sheltered slightly from the Atlantic exposure, and to the east the land slopes gently down to a beach. A stream runs about 30 metres to the southwest. What exactly these stones once formed is genuinely unknown. The remains are too fragmentary and too scattered to read with confidence, and the official designation, a house of indeterminate date, carries as much uncertainty as it resolves.
The most prominent feature is a tall upright slab, 1.8 metres high and tapering to a narrow top, deeply set into the ground. About 1.4 metres to its northeast stands a much shorter slab with a jagged upper edge, suggesting it was once taller before being broken at some point in the past. A large flat slab lying on the ground nearby may originally have stood upright as well. A further low stone sits about 5 metres to the east-southeast. Around all of these, loose cobbles and medium-sized stones are spread across the surface with no discernible pattern, most likely moved and redistributed by wave action over time rather than placed deliberately. The arrangement was not recorded on the Ordnance Survey's 1838 six-inch maps, but by the 1921 edition the spot had acquired a label: 'Thurrows', an old dialectal or local term for furrows or earthworks. Whether that name reflects a genuine tradition of interpretation or simply a surveyor's best guess at something puzzling is itself unclear. About 70 metres to the north-northeast, a comparable set of remains exists, and the two sites may once have formed part of the same modest settlement, though the evidence stops well short of confirming it.