Hut site, Gorteendarragh, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Settlement Sites
On a rugged east-west ridge above Lough Melvin in County Leitrim, five small structures sit quietly beneath the grass, their stone walls reduced to low footings that only reveal themselves once you know what to look for.
These are hut sites, the kind of shelters that once housed people engaged in seasonal farming or pastoral work, and they survive here as subcircular, grass-covered humps arranged within the remains of an associated field system. They are easy to dismiss as natural undulations in the rough pasture, which is precisely why they have endured.
The particular hut recorded here is D-shaped rather than fully circular, measuring roughly 4.7 metres east to west and 4.4 metres north to south on the outside, with an interior space of just 3.2 by 2.6 metres; a room not much larger than a modern bathroom. Its defining wall-footing, about a metre wide, is attached to the southern side of one of the field walls, a practical arrangement that would have saved effort in construction by sharing an existing boundary. The ridge itself sits at the top of a severe slope dropping away to the north, with rock outcrop breaking through the rough pasture, and the view down to Lough Melvin below. Structures like these are often associated with booley farming, the Irish practice of moving livestock to upland pastures in summer, with temporary shelters built nearby for those tending the animals. Whether these particular huts served that function or something else cannot be said with certainty from what survives, but the setting, exposed, elevated, and adjacent to rough grazing, is consistent with that kind of seasonal use.
The site sits within a broader field system, and visitors prepared to read the landscape carefully will find the wall remnants of that system still tracing faint lines across the hillside alongside the hut platforms themselves.