Hut site, Carlanstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Carlanstown, Co. Westmeath

On a low ridge of well-drained pastureland in County Westmeath, now swallowed by woodland, there is a ringfort that contains within its bounds not one but two separate dwelling structures, one of them accompanied by what may be the trace of a souterrain.

That combination, a settlement within a settlement, gives the site a quietly layered quality that goes unnoticed from any passing road.

The larger of the two structures sits at the centre of the ringfort and takes a sub-circular plan roughly seven metres in diameter. It is defined by a low earthen bank, about one and a half metres wide and only twenty centimetres high, with an entrance gap of just over a metre on its eastern side. Extending outward from this structure in an L-shaped depression is what may be the course of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or as a place of refuge. A second, smaller hut site of similar rounded plan occupies the southern sector of the same ringfort. Ringforts themselves, which appear in their thousands across Ireland, were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval families, usually defined by a circular earthen bank and ditch. Finding subsidiary structures preserved inside one, with their banks still readable at ground level and a possible souterrain still leaving its mark on the earth, is less common than the ringfort form itself would suggest.

By November 2011, aerial photography showed the entire monument under woodland cover, which has both protected the earthworks from agricultural disturbance and made them difficult to read from the ground. The ridge position, open to the west and north but sheltered from views to the east and south, would have given its original occupants a practical vantage across the surrounding landscape.

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Pete F
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