Hut site, Ballyremon Commons, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On Ballyremon Commons in County Wicklow, the faint outlines of two ancient dwellings survive inside the enclosure of a ringfort, their foundations low enough to be mistaken for natural undulations in the ground.
What makes the arrangement quietly interesting is not the huts themselves but their relationship to the wider landscape: rather than standing in isolation, they sit within a ringfort that is itself connected to a surrounding field system, suggesting a small, organised community rather than a solitary farmstead.
A ringfort, to give the briefest explanation, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, common across early medieval Ireland and typically associated with farming settlements dating from around the sixth to the twelfth century. Here, the first of the two hut foundations occupies the north-eastern quadrant of the enclosure, measuring twelve metres on its longer axis and defined by an earth and stone bank roughly one and a half metres wide and thirty centimetres high. The second is smaller, at eight metres by five, and is set against the inner face of the ringfort's western bank, its outline now marked only by a low grass-grown ridge of the same modest height. Attached to the ringfort at the south-west and south-east is a field system, which implies that whoever lived here also worked defined plots of land immediately adjacent to their enclosure, a pattern of settlement that archaeologists recognise as relatively integrated and purposeful.