Hut site, Barrees, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
On a north-facing slope in the rough hill pasture of Barrees, the ground has been persuaded, with considerable effort, to behave as though it were flat.
A small circular hut site survives here, its builders having cut into the uphill side to the south and built up the downhill side to the north, producing a level interior on terrain that offers none naturally. That kind of deliberate terracing, modest as it sounds, points to a structure meant to be used seriously, not thrown up in a hurry.
The hut itself is slight but legible. Roughly circular, measuring 3.8 metres across on its northeast to southwest axis and 3.4 metres on the northwest to southeast, it is defined by a collapsed drystone wall, a construction technique using stones laid without mortar, which survives to around 0.4 metres in height and 0.7 metres in thickness. The interior is grass-covered and scattered with stones, and sits raised about 0.2 metres at the northern edge, where the builders compensated for the natural fall of the slope. A gap of roughly 0.4 metres in the northeast of the wall may mark where the entrance once was. Around 70 metres to the northeast, a separate enclosure occupies the same stretch of hillside, suggesting this was not an entirely isolated structure but part of a small constellation of activity on the slope.