Hut site, Keadeen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On the slopes of Keadeen Mountain in County Wicklow, a curved length of ancient stonework traces a partial arc across the ground, the remnant of a prehistoric hut that once sheltered against the inner face of a much larger enclosing wall.
What makes the site quietly arresting is not what survives but what the survival implies: this is one of eight hut sites arranged within a single prehistoric enclosure, all of them clustering together alongside a standing stone, the whole complex forming a settlement whose scale and organisation suggest a community rather than a lone dwelling.
The hut site itself is reduced to a stone wall roughly eighty centimetres wide, with an internal height of around ten centimetres and an external height of sixty centimetres, curving from south-southeast around to the west, where it meets the enclosure wall it was built against. The eastern and northern portions have been lost, and at the point where they disappear there is a gap in the main enclosure wall. Whether that gap was always there or was introduced later is not certain, though the evidence suggests it may have been a later insertion, one that effectively erased part of the hut in the process. Christiaan Corlett, writing in 2004, documented the wider group of monuments at Keadeen, which together include a large prehistoric enclosure and a standing stone alongside the eight hut sites. A prehistoric enclosure of this kind is a defined area bounded by an earthwork or stone wall, and when hut sites are found built into its interior face, as they are here, it points to a settlement where the boundary wall itself served as one side of each dwelling.