Hut site, Fahee, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
Above 600 feet on the rough upland pastures of Fahee in County Clare, a subtly raised circle of grass marks the ghost of a dwelling.
From the ground it might read as nothing more than an uneven patch of field, but satellite imagery reveals it clearly: a circular raised area roughly eleven metres across, the faint signature of a structure that once sheltered someone on a hillside looking out over a valley to the north.
The site sits within what appears to be a multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape was shaped and reshaped by farming communities across several distinct eras. That kind of layered land use is common in the west of Ireland, where the same ground was enclosed, worked, and abandoned repeatedly over millennia. About 125 metres to the northwest lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled circular enclosure used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defensive compound. Whether the hut site and the cashel were in use at the same time, or belong to different phases of the landscape's long history, is not recorded, but their proximity suggests this stretch of upland was once considerably more occupied than it appears today.