House - indeterminate date, Rathfran, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
House
In the rough pasture above the mouth of the Palmerstown River in County Mayo, a slight rectangular rise in the ground may, or may not, be the remains of a house.
That uncertainty is not a gap in the record so much as the record itself. The feature sits on a low terrace just south of a rath, one of those circular earthwork enclosures, typically dating from the early medieval period, that once served as a farmstead or defended homestead. The two features are only about four metres apart, which raises obvious questions about whether they were ever related, and when, but no firm answers are available.
A 1978 report described the site as a small rectilinear platform, roughly nine metres on its longer axis and six on the shorter, with a low scarp curving away from it and faint traces of a bank nearby. When the site was inspected again in 2017, those dimensions had shifted only slightly, to approximately eight metres by six, suggesting the feature has remained largely stable even as it has continued to degrade. What survives is a grass-covered stony rise on the south-east and south-west sides, an inward-facing scarp on the north-west side reaching between 0.35 and 0.4 metres in height, and a north-east side that barely registers at all. The whole sits on an irregular terrace appended to the south side of the rath, with the ground rising sharply to the north-west and the slope falling away to the south-east toward the river mouth. Neither the 1838 nor the 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps show any structure here, which rules out a relatively recent building but does nothing to fix a date further back.
The remains are, in the careful language of those who recorded them, degraded and difficult to interpret. No period has been assigned, no function confirmed. What can be said is that someone, at some point, shaped this ground, and that the shaping is still faintly legible if you know what to look for, a low bank, a scarp, a terrace form that does not quite match the surrounding pasture.
