Hut site, Boheh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
Boheh is a townland in County Mayo that most visitors know, if they know it at all, for its decorated rock, a large outcrop covered in Bronze Age cup-and-ring marks that twice a year appears to swallow the setting sun above Croagh Patrick.
Fewer people are aware that the landscape around it also preserves the trace of a hut site, a low-profile survival of the kind that can be easy to overlook even when you are standing beside it.
Hut sites are the remains of simple, often circular structures, their walls reduced over centuries to little more than grass-covered banks or spreads of stone. They turn up across the Irish uplands in considerable numbers, associated variously with seasonal grazing, early medieval settlement, or earlier prehistoric activity. The Boheh area, sitting in the shadow of one of Ireland's most significant pilgrimage mountains, has clearly seen human use across a very long span of time, and a hut site here would fit within that wider pattern of occupation. Beyond its location in this evocative part of south Mayo, the specific details of this particular site, its dimensions, date, and character, remain unrecorded in any publicly available form at present.