Hut site, Clonkill, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Clonkill, Co. Westmeath

On a south-facing slope in County Westmeath, in ordinary grassland, there is a monument that has effectively disappeared.

A levelled hut site sits on the lower reach of a ridge, its outline detectable only when viewed from above, in the right light, on the right kind of aerial photograph. The Digital Globe image taken in November 2011 caught just enough of its ghost to confirm it was there, but the structure itself, the actual ground-level trace of walls or banks, was no longer visible even then.

The site has a complicated relationship with a nearby ringfort, the circular enclosed settlement that represents one of the most common monument types in the Irish countryside, typically dating from the early medieval period. That ringfort sits roughly 35 metres to the north-east. When the area was examined in 1981, what was described was a possible rectangular house site visible inside the bank in the eastern quadrant of a second, adjacent ringfort. The rectangular form is significant; early Irish house sites tend to be circular or oval, so a rectangular outline inside a ringfort enclosure is a slight anomaly, something that might suggest a later phase of use, or simply the particular preferences of whoever sheltered there. By the time aerial photography became precise enough to look again, that house site had vanished from view entirely, leaving only the levelled outline of the separate hut site on the slope to mark that anyone had been here at all.

What the two features together suggest is a small cluster of activity on this quiet ridge, the kind of low-status, everyday settlement that rarely draws attention precisely because it was never meant to be monumental. Most of what was built here was built to be used, not to last.

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Pete F
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