Hut site, Keadeen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On the slopes of Keadeen Mountain in Co. Wicklow, a cluster of collapsed stone walls traces the outlines of prehistoric life in a way that raises more questions than it answers.
One of the more puzzling details concerns a hut and its small annexe, two oval structures built side by side, their walls touching, yet apparently with no doorway between them and no identifiable entrance to either. Whatever the relationship between those two spaces, it was not one of simple, open access.
This particular hut is one of eight clustered within a larger prehistoric enclosure on the site, which also contains a standing stone. The group amounts to ten closely associated monuments in total, sitting together on the mountainside as a coherent, if enigmatic, prehistoric settlement. The larger of the two conjoined structures measures roughly three metres across its longest axis, enclosed by a stone wall now collapsed to around thirty centimetres in height and about a metre wide, the rubble spread by centuries of weathering. The smaller annexe, pressed against its west-northwest side, is a more modest space, under two metres across. Christiaan Corlett, writing in 2004, documented the group in some detail, and it is his survey that records the absence of any entrance feature or internal connection between the hut and its annexe. Whether the annexe was for storage, for animals, or served some other purpose entirely, the structural evidence does not say.