Hut site, Cill Mhuirbhigh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Mhuirbhigh, Co. Galway

A small rectangle of stones on a grassy terrace in Cill Mhuirbhigh, on the Aran Islands, is easy to walk past without registering what you are looking at.

Only the lowest foundation courses survive, tracing a subrectangular outline measuring 3.4 metres long and 2.3 metres wide, barely the footprint of a modest room. What gives it away as something older than it first appears is the southern wall, which has been absorbed into a modern field boundary, the kind of quiet collision between ancient fabric and working farmland that occurs all over the west of Ireland.

The site sits roughly 100 metres north-northeast of Dún Beag, a nearby stone fort, and was recorded by Tim Robinson in 1980. The structure's dimensions and form are consistent with the small dry-stone huts associated with early medieval settlement and agriculture in this part of Connacht, though the surviving remains are too fragmentary to assign a precise date or function with confidence. Its proximity to Dún Beag suggests it may have been part of a broader pattern of occupation in the area, small domestic or ancillary structures clustering around more substantial enclosures, though that relationship remains speculative given how little of the hut now stands.

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Pete F
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