Hut site, Magheralackagh, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Settlement Sites
Within a rath in County Sligo, tucked into the south-western quadrant where the earthwork's own bank meets a field boundary cutting across the enclosure on an east-west line, there sits the outline of a small oval building that most people would walk past without a second glance.
A rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, that served as a farmstead or settlement unit across early Irish society. This one contains something rarer: the physical remains of the structure that would once have stood inside it.
The hut survives as an oval footprint measuring just under seven metres across on its longer, east-west axis. Its walls, built from a combination of earth and stone, are still present to a modest but legible height, standing around 0.75 metres on the interior face and 0.5 metres on the exterior, with a wall thickness of 1.8 metres. The northern side carries an entrance gap nearly 4.7 metres wide, which is broad relative to the structure's overall size. The floor inside slopes, following the natural lie of the ground rather than any attempt to level it. What makes the arrangement quietly interesting is the geometry of it: the hut sits precisely in the angle formed between the rath bank and the later field boundary, occupying a corner-like space created by two separate episodes of how people organised this land, one prehistoric or early medieval, the other of uncertain but probably much later date.