Hut site, Treanmore, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Settlement Sites
Sometimes the most telling archaeological sites are those that no longer exist.
At Treanmore in County Sligo, a small circular structure roughly ten metres across was captured in an aerial photograph taken in 1968, pressed against a field boundary and embedded within a wider system of ancient enclosures. By the time anyone looked closely at the ground itself, it was gone, along with part of the surrounding field system. What survives is essentially a single image, a shadow in a photograph, and the reasonable inference that this was once a hut site.
The 1968 photograph, taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography (CUCAP), recorded the structure at a moment when it was still legible from the air, even if modest in scale. A cashel, which is a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval date, sits approximately one hundred metres to the north-east, suggesting that this small corner of Sligo once held a cluster of related settlement features. A second possible hut site of similar character lies about fifty metres to the east-north-east, indicating that the Treanmore area preserved traces of a more extensive early settlement pattern before much of it was cleared away.
What makes the site quietly significant is precisely its erasure. The aerial record fixed the structure at a point in time; the ground then moved on. The hut at Treanmore is, in a practical sense, a place that can only be visited in archive, not in person.