Hut site, Noughaval, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Noughaval, Co. Clare

On a south-facing slope in the Burren landscape of County Clare, amid rough pasture and the exposed limestone pavement so characteristic of this part of Ireland, a small oval hut sits within a much larger field system that has been in use across multiple periods of history.

What makes this particular structure quietly odd is not its age or its modest dimensions, but the confusion it has generated on maps and in scholarship for well over a century. Nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey plans labelled it an "Ancient wall with cave", a designation that persisted into the 1920 edition of the six-inch map. As recently as 1977, it appeared on a specialist map as a souterrain, which is an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge. In fact, the feature in question is a small stone-lined hollow inside the hut's eastern interior, roughly a metre square and less than a metre deep, with a stone set into its base. It is almost certainly a well, not a cave or an underground passage.

The misidentification has a named advocate. T. J. Westropp, the prolific Clare antiquarian, described it as a souterrain in 1897, and the label stuck long enough to find its way onto Robinson's 1977 map, decades after his original note. The hut itself is defined by a stone wall between one and one and a half metres wide, with large upright stones forming its inner face, some reaching 1.2 metres in length. The interior measures approximately 6.6 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west. A gap roughly two metres wide in the south-eastern wall appears to be the result of non-recent damage rather than an original entrance. The structure sits within a dense cluster of early remains: a cashel called Cahercutteen, which is a type of stone-walled ringfort, lies about 37 metres to the north-north-east, and the hut is thought to have been associated with it. A cairn site lies some 20 metres to the north-east, another enclosure about 94 metres to the south, and a second cashel, Caherwalsh, around 160 metres to the south-south-east. Taken together, the immediate area preserves a layered picture of early settlement activity, with this small, misnamed hut quietly at its centre.

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Pete F
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