Hut site, Catherinestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Catherinestown, Co. Westmeath

Two sets of grass-covered wall footings sit quietly at the centre of a ringfort in Catherinestown, Co. Westmeath, occupying a low rise of ground surrounded by wet, marshy land now given over to coniferous plantation.

The footings are what remain of two hut sites, the kind of small domestic structures that once sheltered people within the protected enclosure of a ringfort, a roughly circular earthwork enclosure common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. That they survive at all in legible form, in an area where the land is damp and the tree cover dense, makes them a quietly anomalous presence.

What makes the site additionally interesting is what the historical mapping reveals about how it has been perceived and recorded over time. The first Ordnance Survey edition of 1838, drawn at the six-inch scale, shows the enclosure as oval in shape. By the time the twenty-five-inch edition was produced in 1911, the same earthwork is depicted as rectangular. This is not necessarily a contradiction; the shape of earthworks can appear differently depending on survey methods, vegetation, and the degree of survival at any given moment, and cartographers of different periods made different judgements about what they saw on the ground. The two hut sites lie at the centre of the ringfort, their wall footings still visible beneath the grass despite the considerable passage of time since either map was made.

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