Hut site, Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

For decades, this low rubble mound on the western edge of a plateau in County Clare was officially catalogued as a burial mound, a misidentification that lingered in the Record of Monuments and Places as recently as 1996.

It is, in fact, the remnant of a hut site, the kind of modest domestic structure that once dotted the Irish landscape in considerable numbers but rarely survives well enough to attract much attention. The mound sits in rough pasture, its flat top measuring roughly five metres across in either direction, its base spreading to nearly nine metres. Not dramatic by any measure, but quietly worth pausing over.

What lifts it above a featureless heap of rubble is the arc of inner wall-face still legible within it, curving for about four and a half metres between the northwest and east-northeast, and standing up to 1.2 metres high in places. There is a suggestion of corbelling in the upper courses, the technique by which successive layers of stone are each laid slightly inward to eventually close a roof without the need for timber or mortar, though the evidence here is uncertain. The site sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it preserves traces of agricultural organisation from more than one era, layered over one another across the centuries. Roughly 38 metres to the southwest lies a cashel, a stone-walled enclosure of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in the west of Ireland, which suggests this corner of the plateau was once a more organised and inhabited place than its present rough-pastured silence might imply.

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Pete F
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