But at Caherkeen in County Cork, that is more or less what survives of a small rectangular hut site, tucked into the western half of a larger enclosure, and it is precisely its modesty that makes it worth a moment's attention.

The structure measures roughly 4.1 metres north to south and 3.2 metres east to west, making it a compact space by any era's standards. Its northern and eastern sides are defined by a low bank of earth and stone, now only about 0.3 metres high and 0.9 metres wide, which gives some sense of the original boundary even in its reduced state. To the south, a broken line of large stones carries the outline further, and a gap in that line is thought to mark where the entrance once stood. The western side of the hut was not built independently at all; instead, it borrows the wall of the enclosure that contains it, a pragmatic arrangement that was common in early Irish settlement, where a surrounding enclosure wall could double as one side of a domestic building. At the centre of the interior lies a single large stone, its original purpose unrecorded.