Hut site, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On a south-west-facing slope of Sorrell Hill in County Wicklow, a small cluster of stone hut sites sits just beyond the edge of the modern enclosed fields, arranged along a natural scarp where firmer ground gives way to boggy, wet terrain below.
What makes this spot quietly compelling is not any single dramatic feature but the coherence of what survives: six hut sites, clearance cairns, and field boundary walls all occupying a compact, well-defined area bounded by a small stream to the south-east. Together they read less like scattered remnants and more like the preserved outline of a functioning seasonal settlement.
The complex is thought to represent booleying, the practice of transhumance in which farming communities moved their cattle to higher grazing grounds for the summer months, establishing temporary encampments for the herders who accompanied them. This was a deeply ingrained feature of Irish rural life for centuries, and the Kilbeg site may date as far back as the Early Christian period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The hut sites, clearance cairns, where stones were gathered from the land to make it workable, and the boundary walls all appear to belong to the same phase of activity, suggesting a coherent and organised use of the hillside rather than piecemeal occupation over different eras. One later intrusion is an L-shaped stone wall at the south-east end of the group, probably the remains of a nineteenth-century sheep pen, and a field boundary to the north-west also appears to be of nineteenth-century date. One of the hut sites, slightly oval in plan with internal dimensions of roughly three metres by two and a half, retains a low stone wall no more than twenty centimetres high and about seventy centimetres wide. A small subcircular annexe is attached to its north-east side, its probable entrance facing south-south-east, giving the structure an unexpectedly considered layout for something so modest in scale.