Hut site, Deelin More, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Deelin More, Co. Clare

On a limestone shelf on the north-eastern slopes of Ailwee Hill in County Clare, a small circular stone structure sits quietly within a landscape that has been worked and reworked across multiple periods of human activity.

The site is easy to overlook, measuring only around six metres in diameter, but its modest scale is part of what makes it interesting. Karst, the bare, fissured limestone terrain so characteristic of the Burren, tends to preserve surface features with unusual clarity, and this hut site is no exception.

The structure is subcircular in plan and defined by a low stone wall, the kind of simple enclosure associated with seasonal habitation or agricultural use across many centuries of Irish prehistory and early history. It sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape retains traces of boundaries, enclosures, and land divisions laid down at different times, layer upon layer. That broader system suggests this corner of Ailwee Hill was not a marginal or isolated spot but part of an organised and repeatedly occupied territory. The hut site itself was identified through aerial orthophotography captured between 2012 and 2018, a reminder that even in a well-studied region like the Burren, aerial survey continues to resolve features that ground-level observation can miss.

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Pete F
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