Hut site, Crowagh, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Crowagh, Co. Sligo

In the bogland of Crowagh, in County Sligo, a low rise in the ground gives away the outline of a structure that the landscape has been quietly swallowing for centuries.

From above, or in the right slant of light, the sub-circular shape is still legible: roughly eight and a half to nine metres east to west, seven and a half metres north to south, defined by a grass-, moss- and heather-covered bank from which a handful of large stones still protrude along the south-west to north-west arc. Those stones, the largest reaching about ninety centimetres in length and forty centimetres in height, are remnants of an enclosing wall, now almost entirely engulfed in peat and overgrowth. The interior is colonised by bog grasses, mosses, and a dense growth of rushes.

Hut sites of this kind are found across Ireland's upland and boggy margins, typically the remains of small stone-walled shelters used by farmers, herders, or seasonal workers at various points from prehistory through to the early modern period. Without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a precise date to a site like this one; the bog has done its work too thoroughly. What the setting does tell us is something about land use in the Croagh River valley. The broader bog at Crowagh has been worked over time, cut through by old turf cuttings, drainage ditches, and bog roads, one of which runs approximately twenty metres to the south-west of the hut site. That infrastructure of extraction and movement makes the hut site feel less like an isolated curiosity and more like one node in a landscape that was once regularly, if modestly, inhabited and worked.

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Pete F
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