House - prehistoric, Inis Gé Theas, Co. Mayo

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House – prehistoric, Inis Gé Theas, Co. Mayo

On the north-eastern shore of Inishkea South, a small island off the Mayo coast, the wind has done what archaeologists rarely can: it has slowly excavated a Neolithic house from the sand.

The structure sits on an elevated terrace above the beach, exposed in a shallow hollow where erosion has stripped away the covering layers to reveal something that was built, used, and abandoned thousands of years before anyone thought to map this coastline. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's 6-inch maps of 1838, and when the 1921 edition finally acknowledged it, the cartographers labelled it simply 'Thurrows', a term of uncertain meaning that at least confirms the remains were visible by then.

What survives is fragmentary and genuinely difficult to read. The main structure covers a roughly subcircular or subrectangular area of about 9 metres east to west and 8 metres north to south, defined by a low, gapped setting of jumbled stones rather than anything resembling a proper wall. At the eastern end, a smaller annex or possible entrance portico, roughly 4.5 by 3.5 metres, is outlined by larger contiguous upright stones, and two of these, set about 56 centimetres apart, appear to function as jamb stones framing a doorway, both tapering to a narrow pointed apex. A row of six upright stones along the south-eastern edge serves as a revetment, a kind of facing wall, holding back the low scarp that drops to the beach below. Inside the larger room, a sandy floor is scattered with loose stones, limpet and periwinkle shells, and small fragments of animal bone. A north-south line of low stones through the centre may once have divided the interior. All of this is consistent with domestic occupation, and the midden material, the accumulated domestic waste of shells and bone, eroding from the eastern edge of the structure, reinforces that picture. In the early 1990s, two pottery sherds, one decorated and one plain, along with a round flint scraper and four flint waste pieces, were found on the surface. Raghnall Ó Floinn of the National Museum of Ireland assessed the pottery as almost certainly Neolithic in date, placing the house somewhere in the period roughly 4000 to 2500 BC.

Beneath the structure, a compacted brown soil layer, between 10 and 15 centimetres deep, represents the old ground surface on which the house was built. Where the sand above it has blown away, this buried soil is visible in section along the scarp, extending a metre or more beyond the house walls to the south and west before disappearing again under the dunes. It is, in a quiet way, a glimpse of a landscape that existed before the sand arrived, and before the island became what it is today.

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