Hut site, Lahardane More, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
On a north-facing slope in Lahardane More, squeezed between two roughly east-west ridges, there is an oval enclosure that measures about 24.5 metres across and 12 metres deep.
Low, rough walling barely a foot high traces its northern and eastern edges. The southern side takes a different approach entirely: here the builders cut directly into the hillslope, producing a scarp face over a metre tall, with walling running along its upper lip. The result is a structure that uses the land itself as one of its walls, a practical solution that tells you something about the people who made it, even if it tells you nothing definitive about when.
What makes the site quietly puzzling is a cluster of small upright stones arranged just inside the western bank. Two parallel stones, set roughly 70 centimetres apart and aligned northeast to southwest, stand near the west wall. A third, aligned at a slightly different angle, sits about 20 centimetres to the east of the more northerly of the pair. A fourth stone, taller than the others at 84 centimetres, stands 5 metres or so to the south, oriented north to south. Taken together, these uprights suggest some deliberate internal arrangement, possibly the footings or supports for a timber or organic structure that has long since vanished. Hut sites of this kind, which survive across much of Cork and Kerry, were typically domestic in function, used by pastoralists or small farming communities, though precisely dating them without excavation is rarely straightforward. A gap nearly 2.5 metres wide in the northeast wall may have served as an entrance.
The interior is now heavily overgrown with ferns, and the southern half slopes gently northward, following the natural fall of the hillside. The site sits in rough grazing land, one of those places that rewards a careful eye once you know what the low earthworks and scattered stones actually represent.
