Turoe, Turoe, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
House
The name Turoe is well known in County Galway, largely because of the decorated Iron Age stone that bears it.
Less remarked upon is the house that once carried the same name and has since vanished almost without trace. No visible surface evidence of the original Turoe House remains on the ground today, which makes a single surviving photograph all the more arresting.
A black and white image from 1915, held in the Lyons collection at the Department of Archaeology in NUIG, shows what was once a substantial country house: three storeys, five bays wide, built on a T-shaped plan, with plain rectangular windows and a neo-classical porch set into the western wall. It is a recognisably formal composition, the kind of house that would have anchored a rural estate with some confidence. The name Turoe appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1933, confirming the house was a settled and mapped presence across more than a century of Irish life. Sometime in the mid-1950s it was demolished, and a replacement building now occupies the site. The earlier structure left nothing legible in the landscape.