House - medieval, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

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House

House – medieval, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

On the summit of a mound known as Bailey Mór, on the remote island of Inis Gé Thuaidh off the coast of Mayo, there is a medieval house that can no longer be seen.

Its outline has vanished entirely, leaving nothing visible to mark where it once stood. What survives instead is the archaeological record of its former presence, and the knowledge that two other houses once adjoined it to the south, forming a small cluster of dwellings on the high ground of a now largely uninhabited island.

The scholar Françoise Henry visited the site in the late 1930s and recorded a large heap of stones and slabs at roughly this location, publishing her findings in 1945. She read the debris as the collapsed remains of a group of houses, designating this northernmost example House E in her account. The mound on which they sat, Bailey Mór, carries a name with possible Norman resonances, though the structures Henry observed were interpreted as medieval dwellings rather than any kind of fortification. A bawn is an enclosing wall typically associated with tower houses or fortified settlements, and a bailey is the courtyard of a castle or motte, so the placename alone hints at a longer and more layered history beneath the stones. The site is a National Monument in state ownership, a designation that recognises its protected status under Irish law without necessarily making it any easier to find or to read in the landscape.

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