Hut site, Lecarrow, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Lecarrow, Co. Mayo

On a level shelf at the northern foot of a steep rise in Lecarrow, on Clare Island, there is a circle of boulders and stones that most walkers would step over without a second thought.

It outlines a roughly circular area of grassy, stone-free ground, about 8.7 metres north to south and 7.75 metres east to west, low enough that its maximum height barely reaches 40 centimetres. No entrance survives in any clear form, though gaps appear at several points around the perimeter. What makes this modest ring quietly puzzling is that a geophysical survey conducted in 1993 found no magnetic or resistivity trace of the structure at all; the ground, in effect, refused to confirm what the eye can plainly see.

The site sits immediately north-west of a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stones beside a trough that would once have been filled with water and heated with hot rocks. The proximity of the two features suggests some period of shared or sequential activity, though no date has been firmly attached to the hut itself. When rain falls heavily, a curving band of water collects roughly two metres beyond the upslope edge of the stone scatter, tracing an arc from the south-east around to the south-west. This has been interpreted as possibly the ghost of a drainage gully, a shallow channel cut to divert hillside water away from whoever once sheltered inside the ring. It is a small, practical detail, and in its way more evocative than anything more monumental: the idea that someone once sat out a wet Atlantic night behind these stones and thought to keep the floor dry.

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Pete F
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