Hut site, Rossmackowen Commons, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Rossmackowen Commons, Co. Cork

On a steep, east-facing slope in the hill pasture of Rossmackowen Commons in County Cork, a small circle of collapsed stone sits so quietly in the rough ground that it would be easy to step over it without a second thought.

What gives it away, if anything does, is the slight levelling of the earth within: the builders cut into the upslope on the western side and raised the floor on the eastern side to create a flat interior on ground that would otherwise make habitation impossible. It is a modest engineering solution, but a telling one, carried out with dry-laid stone in a place where the wind and the gradient conspire against settlement.

The structure is a circular hut site, roughly four metres in diameter, its defining wall now a jumble of collapsed drystone, around half a metre thick and standing only about forty centimetres at its highest surviving point. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful fitting of individual stones, is among the oldest building techniques in Ireland, and on exposed upland sites like this one it is often all that remains of seasonal or permanent habitation. The interior is partly obscured by rubble, but the deliberate shaping of the ground beneath is still readable. A second hut site lies just four metres to the south-west, suggesting that whoever used this hillside did not do so alone or in passing.

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Pete F
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