Hut site, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On the lower slopes of Sorrell Hill in County Wicklow, a cluster of stone hut sites sits just where the ground begins to soften into boggy, wet terrain, arranged in a roughly linear line along the edge of a natural scarp.
What makes this unassuming scatter of remains quietly remarkable is not any single structure but what the whole ensemble implies: a seasonal, self-contained world that functioned here, probably well over a thousand years ago, and then simply stopped.
The complex comprises six hut sites, a series of clearance cairns, and field boundary walls, all contained within a relatively small and well-defined area on a south-west-facing slope that looks out over a valley shaped by Black Hill to the south. Clearance cairns are exactly what they sound like, piles of stone gathered from fields to make cultivation or grazing easier, and their presence here alongside the huts and walls suggests the whole group was laid out and used together. The most likely explanation is booleying, the seasonal practice of transhumance in which people moved livestock up to higher ground during summer months, living there temporarily in simple shelters before returning to lower ground in autumn. A NE-SW field boundary at the north-west edge of the complex is probably nineteenth century in date, and an L-shaped stone wall at the south-east end appears to be a later sheep pen, but these later interventions frame rather than disturb the earlier core. One hut site is now almost entirely consumed by peat, visible only as a low circular rise roughly two and a half metres across and just ten centimetres high, eight metres east-south-east of another in the group. The date suggested for the complex is the Early Christian period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, which would place these shelters among the older traces of human activity surviving in the Wicklow uplands.