Hut site, Glen (Clanwilliam By.), Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Glen (Clanwilliam By.), Co. Limerick

For decades, this small earthwork in the rough upland pasture of Glen, in County Limerick's Clanwilliam Barony, went entirely unrecorded on Ordnance Survey historic maps.

It was only when an aerial camera passed overhead during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986 that the site revealed itself, appearing as a faint oval-shaped cropmark tucked into the corner of a field. Cropmarks form when buried features affect how vegetation grows above them, creating subtle variations in colour and height that are invisible at ground level but legible from the air. Without that flyover, the site might have remained effectively unknown to the archaeological record.

When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland came to examine it on the ground in 2008, surveyors found a D-shaped area measuring roughly 9.5 metres northeast to southwest and 9.3 metres northwest to southeast, defined by a low earthen bank between 2.3 and 2.6 metres wide. A break in the bank on the northeast side is interpreted as the original entrance. A fosse, which is simply a shallow ditch used to reinforce or demarcate a boundary, runs along the southeastern to southwestern arc of the monument. More unexpectedly, the interior is divided by a second internal bank running northeast to southwest, creating two separate oval-shaped areas on either side of a slope, connected by a narrow gap of just 0.65 metres at the bank's southwestern end. Old field boundaries abut the monument to the northeast, and another lies roughly two metres to the northwest, placing the hut site within a broader, if now largely dissolved, field system.

The site sits within undulating upland pasture, the kind of terrain that can be difficult to read at close quarters. Visitors looking for it should be aware that the earthworks are subtle, with the internal and external banks rising only a matter of centimetres above the surrounding ground surface. The monument is visible on aerial and satellite imagery, including an orthoimage captured in November 2018 via Google Earth, which may be a useful reference before approaching the site on foot. The old field boundaries nearby are worth attention in their own right, as they suggest a wider pattern of land use that the hut site itself was once part of.

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