Midden, Inishgort, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Midden, Inishgort, Co. Galway

At the south-western tip of Inishgort island in Galway Bay, a thin layer of turf is all that separates the present from a much older past.

Just below the sod, and exposed in a ragged cut in the ground, lies a midden, an ancient rubbish deposit, roughly eight metres long and thirty centimetres deep. It rests on boulder clay, and what it contains is both mundane and quietly telling: limpet shells, mostly, with smaller quantities of periwinkles, along with fire-cracked stones and scattered pieces of white quartz. These are the leftovers of meals and fires, the kind of accumulation that builds up wherever people have settled into a place and made repeated use of it over time.

The midden sits about seven metres to the south-south-west of a cashel, a stone-walled ringfort of the kind found across the west of Ireland, typically associated with early medieval settlement. What makes this deposit particularly interesting is the suggestion that it may actually predate the cashel itself, meaning the site was in use before that enclosure was ever built. Adding a further layer of complexity, two fragments of worked mudstone were found nearby, in a disturbed area of debris close to the storm beach that lies immediately to the south. The pieces resemble shale axes and, while they were not found in a secure archaeological context, they point to activity on the island that could extend back considerably further than the cashel alone would suggest.

The site was recorded by Mr. M. Gibbons, and the midden is described as well-defined despite its modest dimensions. The proximity of the storm beach is worth noting as context: coastal erosion and storm activity have clearly disturbed material in the area, which is likely how those mudstone fragments came to be out of position. It is a reminder that on a small exposed island, the archaeology is always in a kind of negotiation with the sea.

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