Hut site, Achonry, Co. Sligo

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Hut site, Achonry, Co. Sligo

In a field in Achonry, Co. Sligo, a subtle circular depression in the ground gives itself away only by the colour of the grass above it.

The short, yellowed turf traces a low bank, no more than twenty centimetres high at its tallest, curving around what may once have been the floor of a small dwelling. The feature never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard tool for recording such things across Ireland for well over a century. It came to light only through aerial imagery, the kind of oblique or overhead view that occasionally reveals what generations of ground-level mapmakers missed.

The possible hut site measures roughly eight metres across its exterior in both directions, with an interior diameter of five to six metres, making it a compact, subcircular space of the sort associated with early settlement. A cashel sits immediately to the south, and a possible enclosure appears to surround the wider area. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, and the proximity of this hut site to one suggests the two features may have functioned together, though no date has been established for either. The bank defining the hut is slightly more pronounced on its western side, where it broadens to two metres and flattens at the top. A field wall running north to south cuts across the western edge of the enclosure, and a telegraph pole stands just outside the bank at its north-western corner, the mundane infrastructure of the modern countryside pressing up against something considerably older, or possibly not old at all. The nature and date of the feature remain genuinely uncertain.

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Pete F
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