Hut site, Carrignamuck, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On a west-facing slope at Carrignamuck in County Wicklow, a small stone hut once sat in open stony pasture, modest enough that you might have walked past it without registering what it was.
Its interior measured just 2.1 metres east to west and 1.8 metres north to south, barely room enough to shelter one or two people, its rough outer wall standing about sixty centimetres high with a more carefully finished face on the inside. Around it, within ten metres, sat three small clearance cairns, the kind of low stone heaps that accumulate when someone is making ground workable, picking rocks from the soil and piling them out of the way. A few metres to the south-east lay what appears to have been a circular hut platform, roughly 1.7 metres across; a second, larger platform edged with small boulders sat five metres to the east; and just beyond that, a natural rock cleft had been roughly lined with boulders, its original purpose now unclear.
The site was recorded during fieldwork in 1990, at which point it still sat in uncleared pasture, its stones visible above ground. It appears in the Archaeological Inventory of County Wicklow, published in 1997, which catalogued monuments of this kind across the county. Hut sites like this one are often difficult to date precisely without excavation; they may relate to seasonal pastoral activity, to marginal agricultural settlement, or to periods of land pressure that pushed people onto hillside ground otherwise considered too rough or exposed for permanent habitation. The clustering of features here, two possible platforms, the lined cleft, the clearance cairns, suggests this was not a single isolated structure but part of a small working landscape, however temporary or seasonal its use may have been.
By the time of a follow-up inspection in 2012, the picture had changed entirely. The area had been planted with commercial forestry sometime after 1990, and the inspection found that none of the features remained visible above ground. The hut, the platforms, the cairns, and the lined cleft are considered likely to have been at least partially destroyed by the planting and its associated ground preparation. The site endures now mainly as a record, a description of dimensions and distances preserved in print while the stones themselves have been swallowed by the trees.