Hut site, Brusselstown, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
Just outside the perimeter of one of Wicklow's most substantial prehistoric hillforts, a low ring of boulders marks out a space where someone once lived, or sheltered, or worked.
The structure sits on a south-facing slope roughly forty metres southeast of the centre of Brusselstown hillfort, and its dimensions are modest but deliberate: an oval platform measuring around eight by nine metres overall, with an interior diameter of approximately five and a half metres north to south and seven and a half metres east to west. The floor has been levelled into the hillside, sitting about forty centimetres below the ground surface to the north and dropping nearly half a metre to the exterior on the south side. A possible entrance, roughly two metres wide, faces southeast, which would have caught the morning light.
The boundary of the platform is formed mostly by boulders, some of them now grass-covered, with a slight eroded bank surviving in the southern quadrant, still about thirteen centimetres high and a metre wide, with boulders set along its outer face. A smaller circular platform, around six metres in diameter, adjoins the main structure. Taken together, these features are consistent with a prehistoric hut site, a term used for the levelled, boulder-defined floors that once supported timber or wattle superstructures, now long gone. Their proximity to Brusselstown hillfort, a large enclosure whose origins likely reach back into the Iron Age or earlier, suggests this was not an isolated dwelling but part of a broader pattern of settlement and activity clustered around the fort.