What you are looking at is the collapsed remains of a drystone wall, no more than half a metre thick and roughly forty centimetres high where it still protrudes above the shallow peat, tracing an enclosure that measures four metres north to south and three metres east to west. The interior is level. It is easy to walk past without registering what it represents: the footprint of a human dwelling, reduced over centuries to a low, grass-softened ring in rough grazing land.

Drystone construction, which uses carefully selected and stacked stone without mortar, was a common building method across many periods of Irish prehistory and the early medieval era, and structures like this one can be frustratingly difficult to date without excavation. What makes this particular site more than an isolated curiosity is its relationship to the surrounding landscape. Two further hut sites adjoin it directly, one at the south-east and one to the south, their walls pressing up against this one from the outside. A fourth example sits approximately forty-five metres to the south-west. Taken together, they suggest not a single lonely shelter but something closer to a small settlement cluster, a grouping of structures that once shared this exposed hillside at Garranes for reasons that remain unrecorded.