Hut site, Skreen Beg, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Settlement Sites
Just two metres outside the enclosing bank of an ancient rath at Skreen Beg, a small square platform of earth and stone sits quietly in a field, easy to overlook and difficult to interpret.
It measures roughly three metres across, raised slightly above the surrounding ground, with low scarps, essentially slight earthen steps or edges, defining three of its four sides. The fourth side backs against a field wall, and whatever once lay beyond that wall has long since disappeared.
This kind of structure is classified as a hut site, a catch-all term for the earthwork traces of small domestic or ancillary buildings whose superstructures have not survived. Its proximity to the rath is likely not coincidental. A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, common across Ireland from the early medieval period roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and typically associated with a single farmstead and its immediate dependencies. A small outbuilding or working shelter positioned just outside the main enclosure would have been a practical arrangement, keeping certain activities or animals close at hand without bringing them inside the domestic ring. Here at Skreen Beg, the original entrance to the platform is no longer recognisable, so whether it opened towards the rath, away from it, or along some now-vanished path between the two, remains unknown.