Building 4, Keem Bay, Achill Island

3D Model

In summer 2016 Achill Archaeological Field School excavated a building at Keem Bay at the western-most part of the island. In 1838 Keem had a village of 40 buildings, but little trace remains today except low grassed over ruins.

Building 4 is a single room house (7.6m by 4.9m ext.) with thick walls of earth faced with dry stone. It had a single door in the SW wall, and a rough stone drain in its NW end. The house had three hearths that suggests that it was occupied epiosodically. There is a strange low stone setting just inside the door that may be for sitting on. Finds from the house suggest a date of the late 18th- early 19th century.

The house was deliberatly demolished and it seems that much of its stone was carried off to build an extensive field system dating to the 1850s. The fields were made by Charles Boycott, who took the lease on Keem c.1855. It was probably he who demolished the village at Keem.