Hut site, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo

On Clare Island off the Mayo coast, the faintest outline of a small rectangular hut survives in the landscape at Bunnamohaun, so slight that it could easily be dismissed as a natural undulation in the ground.

What defines it as a structure at all is a low earthen bank, no more than fifteen centimetres at its highest point and roughly a metre wide, tracing a rectangle measuring about 3.7 metres from north-east to south-west and 2.8 metres across. On the south-eastern, downslope side, there are traces of what was probably an entrance, oriented away from the prevailing weather and towards the slope below.

The hut sits about twenty-five metres south-east of a separate recorded house site, and roughly ten metres from a stream, a positioning that reflects a practical logic common to small rural structures throughout the west of Ireland: close enough to water, sheltered from exposure, placed just off the main dwelling. Whether it served as a seasonal shelter, an outbuilding, or accommodation for a household member is not recorded. What remains is essentially a ghost of walls, the bank too reduced to offer much architectural detail, but enough to confirm a deliberate, human-made enclosure. The site was documented as part of the Royal Irish Academy's New Survey of Clare Island, a multi-volume archaeological study edited by Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning, and John Waddell, published in 2007, which brought sustained scholarly attention to an island whose archaeology had long been overshadowed by its more famous landmarks.

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Pete F
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