Hut site, Doonmacfelim, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Doonmacfelim, Co. Clare

A low, roughly circular stone structure sits on a south-westward-facing rise in the rough pasture of Doonmacfelim, County Clare, surrounded by the limestone outcrops that define so much of the Burren landscape.

The walls are still standing to between 0.4 and 0.8 metres on the exterior, built in a double-faced technique, meaning two neat skins of upright limestone slabs sandwich a core of loose rubble. The whole circuit measures around 8.5 metres north to south and 8.3 metres east to west, with a clearly defined entrance, one metre wide, opening to the west. What makes it quietly worth attention is the internal detail: a secondary wall bisects the interior on a north-west to south-east line, suggesting that whoever used this space had divided it into at least two distinct areas, perhaps for shelter and storage, or for people and animals.

The hut sits within a much larger and longer-lived field system that extends across the surrounding land, one that appears to have been used and modified across multiple periods. That kind of layered landscape is common in this part of Clare, where the thin soils over karst limestone, a form of soluble bedrock riddled with fissures and bare rocky pavements, preserved early agricultural boundaries that elsewhere were ploughed away or built over. About 77 metres to the south lies a cashel, a stone-walled enclosure of the early medieval period typically associated with a farmstead or small settlement, which hints that this hut may have functioned as part of a wider inhabited complex rather than as an isolated structure. Whether the hut and the cashel were in use at the same time remains an open question, but their proximity and the shared field system suggest they were not unrelated.

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Pete F
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