Settlement cluster, Eyrephort, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
On the southern shore of Kingstown Bay near Eyrephort, a stretch of ground roughly 400 metres east to west and 200 metres north to south holds the faint, scrambled memory of what was once described as a whole town.
Today the area reads as little more than a scatter of field clearance cairns, the kind of low stone heaps farmers made when clearing land for cultivation, threaded through with lazy-beds, the familiar ridge-and-furrow earthworks used for growing potatoes in the post-medieval period. It takes some imaginative effort to see a settlement here, but the ground is quietly insistent that something more substantial once stood.
The scholar and antiquarian George Petrie recorded the site under the Irish placename Ballyconry, rendered as Baile Chonrigh, meaning the town of Curigh. Writing of what he called a town of cahers and circular stone houses, he described foundations ranging from roughly six to fifty feet in diameter. Cahers, or cashels, are dry-stone enclosures typically associated with early medieval farming settlements, and Petrie noted that the smaller structures appeared to have been roofed in stone, though none remained intact. His account suggests a site of some density and variety, the kind of place where circular domestic buildings clustered together within or around enclosing walls. Whether what survives today represents the same settlement Petrie saw, or whether later agricultural activity has obscured or rearranged the evidence considerably, is an open question. Immediately to the west lies a wedge-tomb, a type of prehistoric megalithic burial monument that narrows toward one end, indicating that this coastal ground was in use long before any early medieval settlement took shape here.