Hut site, Brideswell Big, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Settlement Sites
At the source of a small stream in County Wexford, two conjoined circular huts sit beside a holy well dedicated to St Bride, and one of them has no identifiable entrance at all.
That detail alone invites a pause. A structure built from mortared stone, surviving to over a metre in height, with walls thick enough to bring its external diameter to four metres, yet with no obvious way in or out. Whatever its purpose, it was not designed for casual coming and going.
The complex consists of two chambers of similar dimensions, set adjacent to St Bride's Well on a gently sloping, north-facing hillside. The stream that rises here runs westward to join the Mine River roughly 800 metres away, and it passed directly through the second of the two huts, entering and leaving a structure that was deliberately left unroofed. This is an unusual arrangement: one chamber corbelled, meaning its roof was formed by progressively overlapping stone courses rather than timber or thatch, while the other was open to the sky and apparently designed to channel water through it. Archaeological excavation, reported by Gregory in 2003, found that the corbelled roof had collapsed at some point, but the open, stream-fed enclosure continued to be used afterwards. Glass and pottery recovered during the dig place the construction and use of the structures in the 17th or 18th century, suggesting these are not early medieval remains but something more recent, and perhaps more functional than devotional, though the proximity to the holy well makes a clean distinction between the two difficult to draw.
