1997:456 - MULLIVILTRIN, Roscommon

Mulliviltrin was an early 19th-century village inhabited by poor sub-tenant cottiers who paid rent to Major Denis Mahon, owner of the Strokestown Park estate. Mahon became infamous when he evicted over 3000 tenants from his townlands in 1847 at the height of the Great Hunger. Mulliviltrin, being a village composed of mud or sod houses, does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps either before or after 1847. The existence of the site is largely known through occasional references in estate records, local oral history, and from an article published in The Freeman’s Journal on 29 April 1848. About 71 people lived in the village, and it was emptied and completely destroyed in 1847. It was never reoccupied. The beginning date for the village is unknown, but it probably dates from no earlier than the late 18th century.

Before excavation began, the Applied Geophysics Unit of the National University of Ireland, Galway, completed a non-invasive subsurface survey of the area indicated by local residents to have been the former village site. Today, the village is completely erased from the landscape, and the land it once occupied is now an unremarkable agricultural field. Using magnetic susceptibility and resistivity tests, the geophysicists, headed by Kevin Barton, located two discrete areas indicated by high readings. On the surface, these areas appeared as small, almost imperceptible, rises on the edge of the empty field.

Twenty-two excavation units, each measuring 2m x 2m, were excavated at the site over the two mounds, with most of the work focusing on the western, or better-defined, mound. Thirty-nine contexts were encountered in the 36.8 cubic metres excavated. One important context was a black ashy soil that indicated the burning of the tumbled cabin in 1847, exactly as the oral testimony had suggested. Another significant context was a large, rectangular stone feature, identified as a free-lying hearth. Free-lying hearths, without chimneys and usually placed in the centre of the cabin, were reported by 19th-century travellers to be typical of the poorest dwellings in the countryside. The hearth consisted of a rectangular arrangement of medium-sized stones placed around smaller, flatter stones. A large stone had been placed at what appeared to be the back of the hearth. The backstone was extremely degraded from intense burning, and most of the other stones exhibited evidence of burning. The mud or sod walls of the building could not be readily identified, though remnants of them were encountered as soil layers near the hearth.

Only 66 artefacts were recovered from Mulliviltrin. With the exception of two obvious intrusions (two centre-fire shotgun shells dating from after 1852), all of the artefacts date from before 1847. The archaeological collection consists of eighteen sherds of refined earthenware (plain pearlware/whiteware; both monochrome and polychrome hand-painted whiteware; blue transfer-printed whiteware, in Willow or Gazelle pattern; and banded whiteware), eighteen sherds of coarse redware (including black-glazed, dark brown-glazed, brown-glazed, tan-decorated, and unglazed varieties), ten pieces of glass (clear, clear-to-frosted, light green, brown, amber, and blue), seventeen pieces of metal, including one single-loop button with back stamp, a piece of black rubber, a piece of cloth, and one deer tooth.

All of the artefacts are domestic in nature, and provide a unique look inside one poor family’s cabin at the time of eviction. The collection thus reveals the presence of at least five mismatched vessels of refined earthenware (probably small bowls or cups), four redware vessels, probably with utilitarian functions, and at least six different glass vessels. No prehistoric or early historic artefacts or other evidence were found during excavation.

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