House - indeterminate date, Westquarter, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
On the northern slopes of Crocmore hill in Co. Galway, half of a circular house has simply ceased to exist.
The southern portion is gone entirely, leaving only the northern arc of what was once a complete dwelling, its double-faced stone wall now buried under a low mound of earth and rubble. The interior diameter measures 4.3 metres, and a stone-lined gap on the eastern side, less than a metre wide, marks where the entrance once stood. Small details like that, a doorway oriented to the east, the deliberate construction of facing stones on either side of a wall, speak to a structure that was once carefully made, even if we cannot say exactly when.
What makes this site more than a solitary fragment is the company it keeps. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1911, recorded five circular house sites in this general area, and this appears to be one of them. Another survives just 50 metres to the north-west. The houses sit to the south-west of a field system on the same hillside, suggesting that whoever lived here was also farming the surrounding land. Westropp was a prolific recorder of western Irish monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his fieldwork in Connacht documented many sites that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Gosling's 1993 study also references this cluster, placing it within a broader survey of the area. The date of the houses remains unresolved; no excavation appears to have taken place, and the label "indeterminate" reflects genuine uncertainty rather than scholarly neglect.