Hut site, Ballyglass Middle, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Ballyglass Middle, Co. Mayo

In a field in Ballyglass Middle, County Mayo, two shallow hollows sit joined together in the ground, forming a rough figure-of-eight shape.

They are easy to miss, and even those who look closely cannot say with certainty what they are. That ambiguity is precisely what makes them interesting.

The hollows lie towards the north-western edge of what may be a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and associated with farmsteads or settlement. The enclosure itself is classified as a possible rather than confirmed example, and the two depressions within it share that same uncertainty. Arranged on a north-south line, each hollow is ringed by a low bank or rim, roughly two metres wide and between 0.3 and 0.65 metres high. The northern hollow is the more clearly defined of the two. The southern one, with a diameter of around three metres and a depth of about half a metre, is poorly defined and partly filled with loose field stones, which makes it difficult to examine properly. They may be hut sites, the sunken floors of small structures once used by whoever lived within the enclosure. Or they may simply be quarry pits, dug at some point to extract stone from the ground. No excavation has been carried out to resolve the question.

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Pete F
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