House - indeterminate date, Moneymore, Co. Galway

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House

House – indeterminate date, Moneymore, Co. Galway

Tucked within the eastern sector of a concentric enclosure at Moneymore in County Galway, a low, grass-covered foundation line is all that remains of what may once have been a domestic dwelling.

The walls survive to a height of only about 0.2 metres, their width roughly a metre, and the plan they describe is D-shaped, measuring 6.6 metres north to south and 4.8 metres east to west. A concentric enclosure consists of two or more roughly circular earthen or stone banks arranged one inside the other, and this structure sits against the inner face of the innermost of those banks, suggesting it was built in deliberate relationship with the enclosure itself rather than inserted into it later.

The site was first recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, who noted it along with two other possible house sites within the same enclosure in a 1919 publication. Westropp was a prolific documenter of Connacht and Munster field monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his observations here form the earliest known reference to these foundations. What makes this particular site quietly puzzling is a second foundation line that extends from the D-shaped structure towards the south-west and curves across the interior of the monument in the direction of the north-west. This internal feature runs for approximately 35 metres and is about 2 metres wide, considerably broader than the house walls themselves. Whether it represents a boundary, a passage, or something else entirely remains unresolved, and no date has been confidently assigned to any of the three structures Westropp identified. The designation "indeterminate date" is not evasion so much as honest uncertainty; without excavation, the ground keeps its own counsel.

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