House - indeterminate date, Slievemore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
House
On the northern slope of Slievemore, the great quartzite mountain that dominates Achill Island in County Mayo, there are ruins that refuse to give up a date.
Recorded simply as a house of indeterminate age, this structure sits among one of the most extraordinary concentrations of abandoned settlement in Ireland, where the remains of dozens of stone dwellings stretch along the mountainside in various states of collapse. The designation "indeterminate date" is not evasion; it reflects a genuine difficulty in assigning these buildings to any single period, because the landscape here layers prehistoric, early medieval, and post-medieval occupation one on top of another in ways that even careful survey cannot always untangle.
Slievemore's abandoned village is most often associated with the practice of booleying, a seasonal form of transhumance in which farming families moved their livestock to higher ground in summer, occupying temporary or semi-permanent dwellings before returning to lower settlements in winter. The village was in use into the nineteenth century, and the trauma of the Great Famine of the 1840s brought that occupation largely to an end, leaving the long rows of roofless stone houses that visitors see today. But some structures on the mountain are considerably older, and the difficulty of dating any individual building reflects how thoroughly earlier foundations were reused, rebuilt, and adapted across many generations. Without closer investigation, a wall that looks post-medieval may rest on courses that are far older.