Hut site, Canalough, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
Three ancient hut sites sit within roughly fifteen metres of each other on a coastal terrace beside Blackball Harbour in west Cork, and the middle one is barely there at all.
What remains is a low, broken outline in earth and stone, a rectangular footprint measuring about six and a half metres from north to south and two and a half metres across, with a narrow entrance gap, just half a metre wide, set into the centre of the eastern bank. The bank itself stands only twenty centimetres high in places, and across much of the perimeter it has dwindled to intermittent traces. Without knowing what you are looking at, you could walk straight over it.
The site occupies a level terrace on the northern slope of a rough east-west ridge, where occasional rock outcrops break through the pasture. The ground falls away toward the shore on the southern side of the harbour. Hut sites of this kind, simple single-roomed enclosures defined by an earthen or stone bank, are found widely across Ireland and range in date from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval. They tend to cluster, as they do here, suggesting that whatever community used them operated in close proximity, perhaps seasonally, perhaps over generations. The three sites at this location are spaced closely enough that their occupants would have been immediate neighbours, though whether they were ever in use simultaneously is not something the surviving remains can answer.