Hut site, Lislarheenmore, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
On the western slopes of a ridge above the head of the Caher River valley in County Clare, a circular hut site sits pressed against the outer northern wall of a much larger enclosure.
It is a modest thing by any measure, roughly three metres across, the kind of structure that vanishes entirely into the landscape until aerial photography reveals its outline. That is precisely how it was identified, through Ordnance Survey orthophotography captured between 2013 and 2018, and subsequently confirmed on Digital Globe imagery.
The hut sits within what is classified as a multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape was shaped and reshaped by human activity across several different periods, walls and boundaries accumulating over generations rather than being laid out at any single moment. The relationship between the hut and the adjacent enclosure is telling: by positioning itself against the enclosure's exterior wall, the structure made use of existing stonework as part of its own shelter or boundary. Whether this means the hut was built after the enclosure, or was integrated with it from the beginning, is the kind of question the available evidence cannot yet answer. At approximately three metres in diameter, the hut would have been a small, functional space, consistent with the kind of temporary or seasonal shelters associated with agricultural or pastoral activity in the Irish uplands.