Hut site, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

Three stones forming a rough arch around a low mound: that is more or less all that remains visible on the south-facing slope of Knocksentry Hill near Lough Gur in County Limerick.

The spot does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic maps, and even modern aerial imagery struggles to resolve it into anything definitive. What makes it quietly compelling is less what survives than what surrounds it. Within a radius of roughly 350 metres, the hill carries at least five other recorded monuments, including a standing stone to the west known as Leagaun, a mound to the north-north-west, an enclosure, an earthwork, and a flat cemetery referred to as Kistvaen Field, where kistvaen denotes a type of stone-lined burial cist. A further two stone circles, designated Circle O and Circle P, sit around 240 metres to the south-west. Whatever this site once was, it was not isolated.

The monument came to light in 1996 during an archaeological field inspection carried out by Celie O'Rahilly on Knocksentry Hill, in an area known as Knockroe overlooking the Knockadoon Peninsula about a kilometre to the south-west. Working through a field bounded by stone-faced earthen embankments and stone walls, O'Rahilly recorded what she described as three stones forming an arch surrounding a low mound. The stones themselves are modest: a recumbent stone roughly one metre in length, an upright stone about 0.7 metres tall with a stone setting at its base, and an earthfast boulder near the eastern field boundary. The recumbent and upright stones are aligned north to south. To the west of this grouping, O'Rahilly identified a natural shelf in the terrain as a possible hut site, the kind of shallow, level platform that would have offered a practical foundation for a simple structure on an otherwise uneven and sloping hillside. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded in November 2020.

Lough Gur is already well known for its concentration of prehistoric remains, so a visitor to this area will find the wider landscape genuinely layered with archaeology. Knocksentry Hill itself is on rocky pasture, and the ground is uneven underfoot, sloping southward. The stone grouping is not dramatic to look at and would be easy to pass without recognising it for what it may be. The site is visible on Google Earth imagery from 2018 and 2020 for those who want to orientate themselves before visiting, and an aerial photograph taken in January 2003 exists in the ASI archive. Given the number of nearby monuments, it is worth approaching with a map or monument record to hand, since the value of this particular spot lies largely in reading it against everything else clustered around it on the hill.

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Pete F
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