Hut site, Clashduff, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Clashduff, Co. Cork

A small rectangular enclosure of dry stone sits on a slope near the Healy Pass road in west Cork, its walls still standing up to a metre high on the north and west sides, the rest reduced to overgrown lower courses.

It measures roughly four metres north to south and three metres east to west, modest dimensions that suggest a single-roomed shelter rather than anything more elaborate. What gives it a particular character is the way it was built into the hillside: the northern side has been partially dug back into the slope, levelling out the interior so that the ground inside sits flush rather than tilting with the gradient beneath it. It is a small but deliberate piece of engineering, made by someone who intended to stay.

The structure sits in rough grazing land among rocky outcrops, to the west of a tributary of the Clashduff River. Sites like this, sometimes called booley huts, were used by communities practising transhumance, the seasonal movement of livestock to upland pastures in summer, though it is not possible to say with certainty that this was the purpose here. The broader landscape around the Healy Pass, a dramatic mountain road cutting through the Caha Mountains on the Cork and Kerry border, contains traces of long agricultural use, and isolated stone shelters of this kind are not uncommon in such terrain. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is simply how much of it remains: the stonework on those two surviving walls has stayed largely intact, which is more than can be said for many comparable sites in similar conditions.

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Pete F
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