Urracly House, Urracly, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

House

Urracly House, Urracly, Co. Galway

A two-storey shell of roughly worked stone sits on a rise in County Galway pastureland, overlooking the low-lying ground of Rathbaun Turlough to the south-west.

A turlough is a seasonal lake, common in the limestone karst of Connacht, that fills and drains through fissures in the bedrock rather than through surface channels, and the view from this ruin would have shifted dramatically with the seasons. What survives of the building is partial but legible: the south wall still stands to full height, with a rectangular doorway placed centrally in it and an alcove set into the interior on each side. Returns of the east and west walls also remain to two storeys, and beam slots cut into both indicate where the first floor once rested. Most of the rest has been levelled, and a modern field wall has been built directly over the lost line of the east wall.

The earliest cartographic record of the house appears on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is marked as a T-shaped dwelling aligned roughly north-north-east to south-south-west. By the time the 1916 edition was surveyed, it was already shown as unroofed, meaning the building had fallen out of use somewhere in the intervening decades. The walls are built of roughly worked stone set in coarse limestone mortar, with some red brick also present, suggesting either repair work or modifications at some point. No rendering survives on any surface, inside or out, which gives the masonry an exposed, unfinished quality. Local tradition holds that the house was used at some point as a barracks, a function that would fit the relatively plain, functional character of what little architectural detail remains, though no documentary evidence has been attached to that account.

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Pete F
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