Hut site, Keadeen, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Keadeen, Co. Wicklow

On the slopes of Keadeen Mountain in County Wicklow, a tiny square enclosure sits tucked into the collapsed wall of a much older, larger structure.

The space it defines is remarkably small, roughly 1.8 metres in each direction, barely enough to lie down in. What makes it stranger still is that no entrance has ever been clearly identified, leaving open the question of how, exactly, anyone was meant to get in or out.

This hut site is one of eight clustered together within a wider prehistoric complex on Keadeen, a grouping that also includes a large enclosure and a standing stone. The hut itself was built directly into the rubble of the larger enclosure's collapsed wall, in the north-western sector, just north of what may once have been an entrance gap into that outer structure. Its own walls, still surviving to around 0.6 metres in height and between 0.65 and 0.75 metres thick, are modest but intact enough to read clearly on the ground. The relationship between the hut and the decaying wall it occupies suggests a sequence of activity on this hillside, with people returning to, and repurposing, a landscape already layered with older monuments. The complex was examined by Christiaan Corlett, whose 2004 study of the site remains the principal reference for the group as a whole.

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