Hut site, Urhin, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
On a rough hillside in Urhin, on the Beara Peninsula in west Cork, a faint circular earthwork sits quietly among grazing land, easy to miss and easier still to walk past without understanding what you are looking at.
It is a hut site, the remnant of a simple enclosure where someone once lived or sheltered, its boundary now reduced to a low earthen bank on one side and a natural rise in the ground on the other, together forming a rough circle just under six metres across.
The enclosure measures approximately 5.9 metres in diameter. To the east, an earthen bank survives to a height of around half a metre; to the west, the terrain itself does the work, with a sharp natural rise serving as the wall. Two small gaps in the circuit, one to the northeast and one to the southwest, have been worn through by cattle over time rather than by any deliberate design. The site lies on the southern side of an old road that once ran northward from the Bearhaven mining complex, a copper-mining operation on the southern shore of the peninsula that was among the most productive in nineteenth-century Ireland. Whether the hut predates that industrial activity or relates to it in some way is not recorded, but its position close to a working road suggests it was not entirely remote from the movements of people and labour. O'Shea and Crowley noted the site in 1972, cataloguing it alongside the many low earthworks and enclosures scattered across this part of Cork.