House - indeterminate date, Kilquire, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
House
At Kilquire in County Mayo, a small rectangular building once occupied the north-western corner of an enclosure, its purpose and age now unrecoverable.
The structure measured roughly four metres from north to south and somewhere between six and eight metres from east to west, dimensions that suggest a modest dwelling or outbuilding of the kind that once dotted the Mayo landscape in considerable numbers. What makes its situation quietly notable is not what survives, but what does not: the building was levelled during land reclamation, erased so completely that aerial photography is now the only record of its existence.
Those photographs, taken in 1970 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, captured the outline of the structure when it was apparently still visible as a surface feature, sitting within a larger enclosure whose own history remains undated. Aerial survey of this kind became an important tool for Irish archaeology from the mid-twentieth century onwards, capable of revealing cropmarks, earthworks, and building platforms that ground-level inspection would miss entirely. In this case, the camera caught something that subsequent agricultural improvement would remove from the ground altogether. The enclosure it belonged to is separately recorded, but the house itself left nothing behind except those two frames of film and its approximate measurements.