Hut site, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
At the foot of Knockmore's western slopes on Clare Island, a small oval depression in the ground is almost all that remains of what was once a dwelling.
The foundations survive as a grassy bank no more than thirty centimetres high at its tallest point, tracing the outline of a hut measuring roughly three metres east to west and just under three metres north to south. A slight gap on the south-south-east side, about sixty centimetres wide, is thought to mark where the entrance once stood. Two such structures sat close together here, this one and a near-identical companion just eight metres to the west-south-west, suggesting that whoever occupied this corner of the island did not do so entirely alone.
What makes the site quietly legible is what the adjacent stream has inadvertently revealed. Along the northern side, where water has gradually eaten into the bank, a buried sod line has been exposed in the stream's cut face, lying between ten and twenty-five centimetres below the present ground surface. A sod line of this kind is a preserved layer of old ground surface, essentially a snapshot of the turf as it existed when the hut was in use and before accumulating soil and peat began to bury it. The site sits on a level patch of commonage, the kind of shared unenclosed land that has long characterised upland areas in the west of Ireland, and the stream descending from Prawke runs just beside it. The information comes from the archaeological survey published as part of the New Survey of Clare Island, edited by Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning, and John Waddell for the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, a project that catalogued the island's archaeology in considerable detail.
The site rewards patience more than spectacle. The foundations protrude so faintly through the sod that a casual walker could cross them without noticing, and only a couple of small stones break the flat interior surface. The stream bank, though, offers that rare thing: an accidental cross-section through time, where the old ground level sits preserved and visible just below the present one.