This one, tucked into the eastern half of a cashel in Ballyjennings, County Mayo, offers something quieter and stranger: a near-perfect square of grass-covered stones, roughly six and a half metres to a side, sitting silently inside a much larger enclosure as though the cashel itself had been built around it.

A cashel is a roughly circular stone enclosure, the dry-stone equivalent of a ringfort, used throughout early medieval Ireland as a defended farmstead or settlement boundary. This particular hut site sits within the eastern half of one such enclosure. When the Office of Public Works documented it in 1983, the description was almost poetically plain, a square area of grass-covered stones east of centre. A later survey carried out by Lavelle for An Archaeological Survey of Ballinrobe and District in 1994 gave it more precise dimensions: 6.3 metres north to south, 6.5 metres east to west, and positioned about 8 metres south of a second hut site within the same cashel complex. That second structure, recorded separately, suggests this was not an isolated dwelling but part of a small cluster of buildings sharing a common enclosure, a domestic arrangement that was once entirely ordinary and is now almost entirely gone from the visible landscape.