Hut site, Cummerstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cummerstown, Co. Westmeath

Inside a ringfort on a hillside in County Westmeath, the low grass-covered wall footings of a rectangular house site survive quietly underfoot.

The combination is worth pausing over: a ringfort, which is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the early medieval period, contains within its western quadrant the remnants of a domestic structure that once stood here long after, or perhaps alongside, the enclosure's original use. The two features occupy the same ground but may belong to entirely different moments in time.

The site sits on the east-facing slope of a prominent hill in Cummerstown, with Lough Lene lying about 400 metres to the south. The rectangular footings are now little more than grassy undulations, the walls themselves reduced to their lowest courses and blending into the surrounding pasture. What survives marks the outline of a building modest enough in its ambitions, the kind of structure that archaeology tends to describe as a hut site, though the people who lived there would simply have called it home. The relationship between the house and the ringfort around it is the quietly puzzling detail: secondary occupation of earlier enclosures was not uncommon in Ireland, and the inner space of a ringfort offered a ready-made sense of boundary and shelter for later inhabitants who may have had little concern for what the earthwork originally represented.

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Pete F
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