Here we have Thomas Raven’s picture map of 1622 showing The Mercers’ Company village of Movanagher. Movanagher was built next to the River Bann as it flowed down from Lough Neagh to Coleraine. Typically, one sees a house surrounded by a bawn and then a village associated with it. This village was not planned, however, as one can see: its houses were scattered.

The village was located here because of its economic resources. The picture map shows the residual medieval forests which surrounded the site, a vast resource of timber - massive oaks which could be felled and shipped down the River Bann for construction at Coleraine and for export. And the River Bann, of course, was also a fantastic resource for salmon and eel-farming.

The bawn and the village was attacked in 1641: the inhabitants fled and the village was destroyed. Interestingly, after the rebellion was quelled, the village was never re-occupied and is now pleasant, quiet pasture. It’s an archaeological resource dating from the 1620s to 1641, which was recently archaeologically explored, and one of the Irish cabins - the small, low, thatched buildings seen within it - was for the first time revealed to archaeological excavation, showing that it was built of small stakes driven into the ground and then roofed with thatch, with a central hearth.

The picture map shows that the village of Movanagher was a mixture of English and Irish architecture. The English planters were building using timber-framed houses roofed with tile: but they were not shy to use the Irish vernacular architectural tradition. The small, low, thatched-roof cabins illustrated in the village must have been built by Irish people - even if they were lived in by English colonists as seems to be the case. The striking difference between these is the arrangement of space and formality within them. Houses standing two storeys high with windows, formal spatial arrangements of rooms and chimneys in the English timber-framed houses, contrasted with these low, dark circular buildings.

The archaeological evidence suggests that the Irish houses were constructed very rapidly using stakes and posts driven into the ground, probably woven together in a wattle formation and then thatched. These would have been very temporary, prone to destruction by fire, and easily vanishing from the landscape and, from an archaeological point of view, they are very rare discoveries.