Windmill Hill/The Rock – ‘Rock-Cut Houses’

Intriguing rock-cut structures on the Windmill Hill/The Rock were excavated over a six-week period in 2015 by staff and students from the University of Maryland with the support of Skibbereen Heritage Centre. The results of this study indicate that these structures were most likely originally carved out for use as part of some industrial process once undertaken on Windmill Hill. But they were later re-utilised as dwellings in the nineteenth century and were home to six families during Ireland’s Great Hunger of the 1840s.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is DSCN2494-1024x768.jpg — The 2015 excavation focussed primarily on the three eastern structures of this row whose rock-cut features seem to represent a multiplicity of uses, some of which remain a mystery. All of the 1,350 artefacts recovered were from a later period and most likely associated with a newer row of houses, Johnson’s Terrace, built just south of this site in the 1890s. The intriguing rock-cut features in each structure offer the only clues as to their pre-Famine use. (Professor Stephen Brighton alongside staff and students from the University of Maryland at work onsite in 2015. Photo: T. Kearney)

The archaeologists concluded that ‘the structures were constructed for different purposes or to house different processes for one or numerous industrial activities’, ‘most likely relating to either milling or to processes of producing and/or processing textiles’. This area ‘has a layered and complicated past’ (see ), ‘one that is invisible in the historical record at the moment’ but, nonetheless, reveals ‘the faint material traces of early industry’.

Structure One:

The stone floor contained numerous deep divots and trenches, some of which functioned as drains but others which are, as yet, inexplicable as they do not drain anywhere. There were hearths uncovered on the east and west walls.

Structure Two:

The floor here has many divots and drainage features but also contains post-holes which may relate to the intriguing holes and niches cut into its eastern wall. The rock-cut western wall features a hearth and appears to have been the family’s living area during the Famine. This was separated from the byre-end to the east by an internal partition and a floor drain which was used to remove animal waste.

Structure Three:

There is no trace of a hearth here other than a shallow pit on the floor abutting the eastern wall. The floor does appear to have a drainage system, albeit a peculiar one, which makes a 90-degree turn and does not drain externally. It also has an incline cut into the stone floor which ‘could provide evidence of the structure’s use in a commercial or industrial context’ (i.e. as a loading platform or for storage).

The beam slots cut into the walls of structures 1-2 and 4-6 ‘do not seem to have functioned as support beams or joists’ as they are horizontal and an average of one metre from the floor. They suggested that ‘these beams functioned to provide a frame or structure supporting or stabilising machinery in place or were, themselves, part of the mechanisms in the structures and acted as levers’.

Whatever their origin, by the 1840s, these structures had been re-purposed as homes for six families during the Great Famine, and were used as dwellings for many decades after. These residents also modified them, with a partition added on the eastern side of Structure Two to create a separate area for animals, and a crude-cut drain to remove animal waste from the interior. This area of Skibbereen was particularly badly-affected by the Famine and we can assume that these poor people, like many others, suffered terribly during this tragic time.

The Griffith’s Valuation House Book from March 1850 lists six families living in the rock-cut structures – the Collins, Driscoll, McCarthy, Sullivan, Burke and Regan families (houses 11-16 on map). These tenants were landless, renting only the houses and none of the surrounding land and, like 43% of the population of this area, occupied single-room houses.

By 1901, just two of the structures were still occupied – by the Leary and Keohane households – with the newly-built Johnson’s Terrace to the south of them. Their occupations were listed as ‘general labourer’, ‘charwoman’ and ‘dressmaker’. The Collins and Donoghue families were the residents in 1911, the latter with live-in lodgers described as ‘farm labourers’. The occupants’ unskilled professions, alongside the presence of boarders, even in these crude single-roomed dwellings, showed that this area was home to some of Skibbereen’s poorest families. (Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland).

The 1911 census return shows 5 people living in one of these tiny rock-cut houses, 3 of them as lodgers.

Source document: Stephen A Brighton & Andrew J. Webster, ‘Final Report: Archaeological Investigations on Windmill Hill, Skibbereen, County Cork, Site Number: 15E0153’ (Unpublished report, National Museum of Archaeology Dublin, 2015).