Hut site, Boleycarrigeen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
A stone pillar barely three quarters of a metre tall leans at an angle from the bank of a ringfort in the Wicklow forestry, and carved into its surface is a single word in ogham: VOTI.
Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by sets of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, and it was used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries. That one word, a personal name in the genitive case, is enough to suggest that someone once wanted this place marked as theirs, or as belonging to their memory.
The ringfort at Boleycarrigeen occupies a south-east-facing slope, and within its interior, in the north-west quadrant, sit the drystone foundations of what appear to be two small hut-sites. The foundations measure approximately five metres by five metres and four metres by five metres, modest outlines of domestic space now half-absorbed by the surrounding forestry. R.A.S. Macalister, who catalogued the ogham inscription in 1945, read it as VOTI, a form associated with the Latin votive tradition or, more likely in an Irish context, a Latinised rendering of a personal name. The pillar stone was not placed inside the enclosure but protrudes from the bank itself, which gives it a slightly ambiguous character, somewhere between boundary marker and memorial.
The site sits within managed forestry, which affects visibility and access depending on the season and the state of any recent felling or planting. The ringfort bank is the most legible feature from ground level, and the leaning pillar stone, though small, is the detail that repays a closer look. Its inscription is worn but has been recorded precisely enough that the four ogham characters are not in serious dispute.