Hut site, Coolnatullagh, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coolnatullagh, Co. Clare

On the slopes of Gortaclare Mountain in County Clare, a roughly oval arrangement of stone flags marks out a space barely six and a half metres across.

Some of the flags are set upright, on edge; others lie flat. The interior is filled with stone rather than empty, which gives the structure an almost solid, compressed quality, as though the building material and the dwelling itself have slowly merged over centuries of abandonment. This is a hut site, the remains of a small prehistoric or early medieval shelter, and what makes it quietly remarkable is not the structure alone but the density of remains surrounding it.

The hut sits on a south-facing terrace at the foot of a low ridge, a position that would have offered some shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather while catching what warmth the sun afforded. A second hut site of similar character lies about ten metres to the north-east, and two animal pens cluster nearby to the north and north-east, suggesting a small working settlement rather than an isolated dwelling. All of this sits within what is recorded as an extensive, multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape here was divided, worked, and reorganised across several different eras, each generation leaving its own geometry of walls and enclosures across the bare rock pavement. Roughly sixty metres to the south-east, a wedge tomb adds an older layer still. Wedge tombs are megalithic burial monuments, typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, constructed from large stone slabs arranged in a wedge shape, narrowing from front to back. Their presence in this upland area points to a landscape that has attracted and sustained human activity for thousands of years, long before the hut sites themselves were built.

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Pete F
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