Hut site, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo

On a south-facing slope above the shore at Lackwee, a small scatter of stones marks the outline of a structure that most walkers would step over without a second glance.

What makes this modest ruin worth pausing at is the way it fits into a broader, largely forgotten landscape: a hut of roughly rectangular plan, barely 2.8 metres east to west and 2 metres north to south internally, built not in isolation but deliberately against the northern side of an older field boundary wall. That detail alone, the decision to incorporate an existing wall rather than build from scratch, speaks to a kind of practical economy that characterises much of the vernacular building in this part of Mayo.

The hut sits on rocky commonage in Bunnamohaun, part of a field system whose tumbled boundary walls still meander across the ground. The structure itself is poorly defined now, its walls reduced to a spread of loose stone roughly 0.6 metres wide, though the southern and western sides retain the clearest traces. One carefully set stone survives on the inner face of the western wall where it meets the boundary, measuring around half a metre long and a quarter of a metre high, and two slightly smaller set stones remain at the western end of the southern wall. These are the kind of details that suggest someone built here with some care, even if the scale was minimal. There are gaps in the eastern wall, possibly original entrances, and the interior is largely clear of stone except for some collapse in the south-western corner. The structure lies just fifteen metres west of an unfinished nineteenth-century road, one of the network of relief roads begun during the Famine era but never completed, which gives a rough context for the landscape around it, a place shaped by both subsistence farming and catastrophic disruption.

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Pete F
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