Hut site, Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare

On a high plateau in County Clare, a small grass-covered hut site sits quietly within what appears to be a much larger and older landscape of human activity.

The structure itself is modest, roughly subcircular in shape, measuring about 4.4 metres northeast to southwest and 3.3 metres northwest to southeast, with a low stone wall between 0.6 and 0.8 metres wide still visible beneath the turf. What makes it worth a second look is not the hut alone but the accumulated strangeness of its surroundings, where multiple periods of occupation seem to have left their marks on the same patch of rough pasture.

The hut sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the boundaries and enclosures around it were not all built at the same time but accumulated across different eras of use. A later drystone wall, built with its stones laid lengthways across the wall rather than along it, partly encircles the hut site at a distance of between 15 and 22 metres, running from the northwest around to the east. At the western end of this later wall is a small enclosure, roughly 6 metres east to west and 4 metres north to south on the inside, defined by walls of the same construction. The researcher Grant, writing in 1995 and returning to the subject in 2004 and 2006, designated this drystone wall and enclosure as 'Enclosure H' as part of a broader investigation of the monuments clustered in the immediate area. That cluster is telling: a cairn, a mound of stones typically associated with burial or ceremonial use, lies about 15.5 metres to the south-southeast, and a standing stone sits roughly 34 metres to the southwest. The hut is not an isolated curiosity but one node in a landscape that was clearly significant to the people who shaped it, across what may have been a very long stretch of time.

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Pete F
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