Hut site, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Ballynahown, Co. Clare

On a rocky upland in County Clare, a roughly circular stone wall encloses a space no bigger than a modest living room, its large blocks now half-smothered in whitethorn scrub.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1905, called it 'a curious hut', and the label has a certain accuracy. The wall still stands to a height of between one and one-and-a-half metres on its interior face, with a gap of about a metre in the northern side that Westropp identified as a gateway. What caught his attention most, though, was something that has since vanished entirely from view: the nearly-closed mouth of a souterrain opening to the east. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often used for storage or as a place of refuge. No trace of it is visible today.

The hut sits on high ground with wide views sweeping from south-west to north-north-west, and it does not sit alone. About fifty metres to the north lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure usually surrounding an early medieval farmstead, and a second cashel stands roughly sixty-five metres to the north-east. A cairn, a mound of stones that may mark a burial, lies less than a hundred metres to the west-north-west. The concentration of features across this relatively small stretch of rocky ground suggests that the area saw sustained, purposeful activity at some point in the early medieval period, though the precise relationship between the hut and its neighbours remains unresolved. The interior wall dimensions Westropp recorded in 1905, around 5.88 metres across, align closely with more recent measurements of approximately 5.8 metres east to west and 5.3 metres north to south, suggesting the fabric of the structure has changed little since he picked his way across this hillside more than a century ago.

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