Hut site, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On the lower slopes of Sorrell Hill in County Wicklow, a cluster of stone hut sites sits quietly outside the boundaries of any enclosed farmland, on open mountain grazing that has changed little in centuries.
What makes the site unusual is not any single structure but the ensemble: six hut sites, a set of clearance cairns, and field boundary walls arranged within a compact, well-defined area, bounded on the south-east by a small stream and on the north-west by a field boundary thought to date from the nineteenth century. The huts follow the edge of a pronounced scarp in a roughly linear arrangement, positioned just where the ground drops away into boggy, wet terrain below.
The complex is thought to represent booleying, a seasonal practice of transhumance in which farming communities moved their cattle to upland pastures during summer months, occupying temporary shelters for the duration. The evidence here points to an early date, possibly the Early Christian period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The hut sites, clearance cairns, and stone walls appear to be broadly contemporary with one another, suggesting a single episode or tradition of seasonal use rather than ad hoc accumulation over time. One of the smallest structures, with an internal diameter of just one and a half metres, sits only a short distance north of a more substantial hut, hinting at the domestic scale of these seasonal encampments. The one later addition to the landscape is an L-shaped stone wall at the south-eastern end of the group, likely the remains of a sheep pen of more recent origin. The valley to the south, formed between Sorrell Hill and Black Hill, would have provided both shelter and a clear orientation for people working this ground long before any of the surrounding land was formally enclosed.