Hut site, Castlequarter, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On a steep south-facing slope in County Wicklow, a cluster of ancient hut sites clings to the hillside just below the stone rampart of a hillfort, arranged as though the people who built them wanted to stay as close as possible to the protection of the walls above without actually living inside them.
One of these, an oval structure roughly six metres across at its longest and four and a half metres wide, survives as a shallow platform defined by grass-covered boulders, its outline still legible in the landscape after what may be thousands of years.
The hut sits within one of the more complex upland enclosure systems in Leinster. The hillfort on Brusselstown Hill, whose stone rampart rises directly above, is itself part of the broader Spinans Hill hillfort complex, a multi-period arrangement of enclosures and earthworks that suggests long or repeated occupation of this high ground. Hillforts of this kind, typically large enclosures defined by banks, ditches, or stone walls on elevated terrain, are thought to date in Ireland generally to the later prehistoric period, though their use and meaning varied considerably. The hut site itself is modest in scale: the boulder walls are about one and a half metres wide, and a possible entrance, around the same width, faces south-west. Immediately to the north, a second hut site is conjoined to it, the two structures sharing or abutting one another in a way that implies either simultaneous occupation or gradual accretion over time.
The south-facing aspect of the slope would have offered shelter and light, practical considerations that still make the location feel deliberate rather than incidental. The boulders are grass-covered now, merging into the hillside, and the platform on which the hut stands is only slight, but the geometry of the oval, and the careful placement of the entrance, become clearer the longer you look.