Hut site, Farrandeligeen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
In a pasture at the foot of a rock outcrop in Farrandeligeen, west Cork, a ring of eleven sandstone slabs sits quietly in the grass, each one set upright on end, none of them rising much above knee height.
The arrangement is small, roughly oval, measuring just over four and a half metres east to west and three and a half metres north to south. It is the kind of thing you might step over without registering what you were looking at.
What the slabs mark out is the footprint of a prehistoric hut, the sort of simple stone-founded shelter that would once have supported walls and a roof of organic material long since vanished. The eleven uprights form the inner ring, averaging about thirty centimetres in height. A short arc of three slightly smaller stones curves around the outside of the ring to the north-east, set roughly seventy centimetres beyond the inner circuit, suggesting a secondary structural element, perhaps a windbreak or a thickening of the wall at a vulnerable angle. On the eastern side, three low stones placed radially, one pointing north and two running parallel to the south, may be the remnants of an entrance passage, a short revetted corridor of the kind sometimes seen in hut sites of this type, where stones are used to line and stabilise a threshold. The sandstone itself is the local material, the same rock that breaks through the surface in the outcrop immediately behind the site, which likely offered both shelter from prevailing weather and a ready source of building stone.
