Hut site, Caherloghan, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Caherloghan, Co. Clare

Inside a cashel on the edge of the Burren, a small and easily overlooked structure sits tucked against the inner face of a much larger enclosure wall.

A cashel is a ringfort built of dry stone rather than earthen banks, and this one at Caherloghan contains within its northern sector what surveyors classify as a hut site, a term covering the remains of a small domestic or ancillary building whose original roof and fittings have long since gone. What persists is a roughly oval outline, measuring approximately six metres across in one direction and five in the other, defined by a moss-covered drystone wall built from small stones generally between ten and twenty centimetres in length. The wall stands about seventy centimetres on its inner face, somewhat less on the outer, and spreads to a total width of around three and a half metres at its base, suggesting a construction style common in early medieval Atlantic Ireland where walls were built wide and low rather than tall and thin.

The hut does not stand alone. It abuts a linear wall to its east, sits immediately north of a separate house site, and at its north-north-east end it is actually cut into the grass-covered interior wall of the cashel itself, making use of the enclosure's own fabric rather than building independently from it. This kind of integration, where later or ancillary structures borrow mass and shelter from an existing enclosure, is often read as evidence of a settlement that grew incrementally, with occupants adapting what was already standing rather than beginning from scratch. Where the wall is least defined, around the south and south-east, collapse may indicate the position of an original entrance. The overall pattern at Caherloghan is of a layered, domestic complex within a single enclosure, each element in close proximity to the others.

Access to the full picture is not straightforward. Dense briar growth covers much of the hut site's northern and western arc, making it difficult to read the complete circuit of the wall from ground level. The clearest view is from the east, where the general outline of the structure can be taken in without obstruction.

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Pete F
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