Hut site, Drombeg By.), Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
Most visitors who make their way to the Drombeg stone circle in west Cork are unaware that roughly 45 metres to its east-southeast, on a natural rock terrace cut into the southern slope of a low hill, the ground holds the layered remains of a settlement that grew, was altered, was demolished, and was rebuilt across multiple generations.
The site is not a single structure but a sequence of them, each phase overlapping or incorporating the last, and that accumulation of human decision-making is what makes it quietly remarkable.
Excavated by Fahy in 1960, the site revealed at least eight identifiable phases of use. The earliest was a simple C-shaped shelter, little more than a curved windbreak of stone. This gave way to a proper stone hut, which was later demolished and replaced by a figure-of-eight-shaped hut, a design in which two roughly circular cells are joined together, with the doorway of the earlier building reused in the new one. Contemporary with this later hut was a roasting oven and a fulacht fiadh, a type of ancient cooking place typically consisting of a trough and a mound of fire-cracked stone, found widely across Ireland and generally associated with the heating of water by dropping hot stones into it. A stone causeway was eventually built connecting the hut to the fulacht fiadh. Fahy noted that the burial found at the nearby stone circle and the cooking site at the hut appeared to date to around the same period, leading him to suggest that those using the huts may have been the same people who frequented the circle in its later life, if not those who raised it originally. Subsequent analysis complicated that picture considerably: a later radiocarbon study of charcoal from the circle's grave, reported by Waddell in 1998, placed the burial in the range 1124 to 794 BC, substantially older than the original excavators had believed, and pushing the stone circle's active use much further back in time than the hut site's own dates would suggest.
The site sits in pasture and is part of the same protected complex as the stone circle and the fulacht fiadh nearby. The hut remains are low and unobtrusive at ground level, but aerial photographs show the outlines of the various phases with some clarity, the figure-of-eight plan in particular legible from above in a way it is not from the path.