Hut site, Noughaval, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Noughaval, Co. Clare

Viewed from above, the arrangement would look like the letter B pressed flat against the limestone: two D-shaped huts set side by side, their curved walls facing east, a third possible enclosure formed where a further curved wall closes the gap between them.

This cluster of structures in Noughaval, County Clare sits quietly in open pasture on grass-covered limestone pavement, the kind of exposure typical of the Burren, where the bare rock pushes close to the surface and ancient stonework blends almost seamlessly into the terrain around it.

The complex measures roughly 12.5 metres north to south and 10.5 metres east to west, with a shared straight western wall running about 12.5 metres in length. The walls themselves are between 0.7 and 1 metre wide and still stand to around half a metre in height, built from notably large, distinctive stones with relatively few upright pillar stones among them. A narrow entrance gap, just 0.5 metres wide, opens at the south-east of the southern hut, whose interior sits roughly 0.6 metres lower than that of the northern one, a small but telling detail that suggests deliberate shaping of the ground or possibly differential subsidence over time. The huts lie about 9.5 metres west of Caherwalsh cashel, a cashel being a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure typically used as a defended farmstead, and the whole group sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape carries traces of human organisation across several different eras. Whether these huts were shelters, working spaces, or domestic quarters associated with the cashel is not certain, but their proximity and the coherence of the surrounding field system suggest they were once part of a working agricultural complex rather than isolated structures.

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Pete F
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