House - prehistoric, Knock, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

House – prehistoric, Knock, Co. Galway

On the southern slope of Knock Hill, near the south-eastern tip of Inishbofin, a low circular outline sits half-swallowed by peat.

It is easy to mistake for a natural feature of the landscape, a slight thickening of the ground, a gathering of old stones. It is, in fact, the remains of a prehistoric house, roughly ten metres in diameter, its enclosing wall built from large boulders and possibly anchored in places to the underlying rock outcrop beneath. A well-defined gap in the eastern side of the wall marks where the entrance once stood, oriented, as was common in Atlantic Ireland, away from the prevailing westerly weather.

The site sits on a high-level terrace, a natural shelf in the hillside that would have offered both a commanding view of the surrounding sea and some shelter from the wind. Field walls run nearby, one aligned north to south to the west of the house, another dropping away downslope to the south-east, suggesting that this was not simply a dwelling in isolation but part of a small organised landscape, land divided and managed by whoever lived here. A comparable house site lies around three hundred metres to the south-west, hinting that this corner of Inishbofin once supported a more substantial prehistoric community than the island's current quiet profile might suggest. The thin mantle of peat that now covers the wall is, in a sense, what preserved it; peat grows slowly and seals what lies beneath, keeping the stonework from being robbed out or scattered over the centuries. The site was recorded by M. Gibbons, one of a number of previously undocumented prehistoric remains on the island brought to wider attention through careful ground survey work.

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