Hut site, Canalough, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
On the southern shore of Blackball Harbour in County Cork, a low grassy bank barely half a metre high is all that remains of a rectangular structure that once stood on a level terrace above the sea.
Easy to walk past without a second glance, the site becomes more interesting when you notice that it is not alone. Two further hut sites lie within a few dozen metres, one fifteen metres to the west and another twelve metres to the south, suggesting that whatever activity once took place here was communal rather than isolated.
The structure itself measures 7.2 metres north to south and 3.2 metres east to west, its outline formed by a bank of earth and stone roughly a metre wide. At the south-west corner, a single stone slab, standing on its edge and measuring 1.2 metres long and half a metre high, has survived upright, giving a rare sense of deliberate construction amid the general collapse. Inside the south bank, a build-up of rubble and earth may represent the remnants of an internal east-west division, hinting that the interior was partitioned into at least two distinct spaces. The bank varies considerably in height and is largely swallowed by long grass, with the underlying ridge of rough pasture and occasional outcropping rock adding to the difficulty of reading the site from the surface.