Hut site, Mweelin, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
On a wedge of elevated ground where the Mweelin River meets a smaller tributary stream, a circle of earth and stone barely three metres across sits half-swallowed by heather and moss.
It is easy to walk past without registering it as anything other than a slight rise in the bog, but the low bank that defines it, surviving best along its northern arc and fading to almost nothing on the eastern and southern sides, marks the footprint of a hut that once sheltered someone in this remote corner of Connemara.
The structure is a subcircular enclosure, the kind of small dwelling associated with seasonal or semi-permanent habitation, and it sits within an area of cutaway bogland inside what is now Connemara National Park. Cutaway bog is land from which peat has already been harvested, leaving a stripped, open landscape that can reveal older features ordinarily buried beneath centuries of accumulated peat growth. About thirty metres to the northwest, on the far side of the river, lies a pre-bog wall, a field boundary that predates the formation of the bog itself and hints at a period when this valley was farmed rather than flooded with peat. The two features may be connected, suggesting a small agricultural settlement that functioned here before the bog gradually took over. A ruined farmhouse and outbuilding to the southeast add another, later layer to that long occupation of the land.