House - medieval

The National Monuments Service's description

On the island of Inishkea North, located on the S slope of a mound (MA023-014003) known as Bailey Mór.
Henry (1945, 140: House H) first recorded this house in the late 1930’s, describing it as ‘a house of the same type as House A’ (MA023-014004-). In 1946 she carried out a partial excavation of the interior. The excavation results were not published, but details survive in the archive of her papers (Greene 2009, 156). Only the N wall of the house, with short returns of the E and W walls survived. There was a cupboard recess towards the W end of the N wall. Fragmentary remains of a stone-edged and -lined central hearth were uncovered. Finds from a blackened occupation layer included eight bone points, many broken marrow-bones, smaller bone fragments, fish bones and bird bones (ibid. 156). Henry (1945, 140) also noted that the ‘mass of shells and bones which filled the house has been partly washed away on the slope below’, and she recovered a pig-fibula pin and a bone borer from this material.
Within a sand layer, which is likely to have been wind-deposited after the abandonment of the house, she found a decorated bone comb, of a type dating to between the 11th and 13th centuries (Green 2009, 157).
The exact location of this house remains uncertain; no structure matching her description is now evident on the S slope of the mound, and it is unclear whether there are any extant remains.
National Monument in state ownership (no. 379)

Compiled by: Jane O’Shaughnessy

Date of upload: 12 July 2023

References:

Henry, F. 1945 Remains of the Early Christian period on Inishkea North. Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland 75, 127-155.

Greene, S. 2009 Settlement, identity and change on the Atlantic Island of North-West Co. Mayo c. AD400-1100 (2 vols.) Unpublished PhD thesis submitted to University College Dublin.