Hut site, Kilree, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Settlement Sites
At Kilree in County Kilkenny, the faint circular outline of what was probably a small dwelling appears not as a mound or a ruin but as a ghostly impression in a crop.
These cropmarks, visible only from the air and only under the right conditions, form when buried features affect how plants grow above them, producing subtle differences in colour and height that become legible only when viewed from altitude at the right time of year. This one was noticed within the western quadrant of a larger enclosure, itself a separate recorded site, suggesting that whoever occupied the hut was living inside a defined and presumably bounded space.
The site came to light through a series of aerial photographs taken during the summers of 1969, 1970, and 1971, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. That three separate flights across three consecutive years captured the same faint mark adds a degree of confidence to its identification, though the record is careful to say it is probably a hut site rather than confirming it outright. No excavation appears to have followed, so the structure beneath the soil remains undisturbed and undated. The enclosure it sits within places it in a broader tradition of enclosed settlement that runs through much of early medieval Ireland, though without further investigation the precise period is impossible to pin down.