Hut site, Ballybrack, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Settlement Sites
Somewhere on the southern slope of Two Rock Mountain in County Dublin, a hut site exists mostly as a cartographic memory.
It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1843, marked as a hut site set within a semicircular enclosure, the kind of simple curved boundary that would once have defined a small domestic or agricultural space on the upland. Since then, fieldwalkers have gone looking for it and come back empty-handed. The features have not been identified on the ground.
The 1843 OS six-inch series was a remarkable undertaking, one of the most detailed surveys of its kind in the world at the time, and it captured many features of the Irish landscape that were already fading or had recently disappeared. That this site was legible enough to be recorded by surveyors in the early nineteenth century, yet cannot now be traced by people walking the same terrain, tells its own quiet story about what upland landscapes absorb over time. The site carries the reference DU025-040001- in the archaeological record, compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy and uploaded to the national database in July 2018. Beyond its position on a south-facing slope in the Ballybrack area, and the boulder-strewn, heath-covered character of the ground around it, the record offers little further detail.
Two Rock Mountain sits within the Dublin Mountains and is accessible via several well-used walking routes. The terrain in this area is rough underfoot, with heather, scattered boulders, and the kind of ground that makes systematic field survey genuinely difficult. The south-facing slope where the site was noted receives reasonable light on clear days, but the vegetation is dense enough to conceal low earthworks or stonework without much effort. Anyone walking here with an interest in the archaeology should not expect to find a visible monument. What is interesting, rather, is the exercise of looking at a landscape that the map insists once held something, and finding only the mountain as it presently is.