Hut site, Cahermaan, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cahermaan, Co. Clare

At the highest point inside a stone enclosure in County Clare, a circular hut site sits precisely where you might expect the most important structure to be, at the very centre of things.

It is modest in its present form, a grass-covered ring of wall just thirty to forty centimetres high and a little over a metre wide, but its position within the cashel is deliberate and legible even now. A cashel is a dry-built stone ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland, and this one carries the designation CL009-001008-. The hut itself measures 6.3 metres in internal diameter from north to south, large enough to have served as a dwelling of some consequence within the enclosure.

What makes the site quietly complicated is the later intrusion across it. A drystone field wall, built sometime after the hut fell out of use, runs east to west directly over the interior, cutting across the space as though the earlier structure were simply convenient ground. This kind of layering is common in Irish landscapes, where agricultural boundaries were drawn and redrawn across centuries without much ceremony, but it does make reading the original form of the hut more difficult. The building stones of the hut wall remain visible in the northern sector, which gives some sense of how the structure was originally constructed before grass and time reduced it to its present low profile.

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Pete F
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