Hut site, Oughtmama, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
On the eastern summit of Turlough Hill in County Clare, a large enclosure of unusual shape contains the traces of small stone dwellings arranged around its inner edge.
The enclosure itself is hexagonal, which is far from the typical form for early Irish enclosures, and within its north-western quadrant sits a hut site set roughly thirty metres back from the perimeter wall, positioned to the south-east of a second hut that presses directly against the enclosure boundary.
The arrangement was recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, who included a plan of the site in a 1905 publication. Westropp was one of the most diligent field recorders of his generation, travelling extensively through Munster and Connacht to document monuments that were already beginning to lose their definition. His plan places this particular hut site in clear relation to its neighbours, several of which abut the inner face of the large enclosure at various points around the perimeter. An enclosure of this kind, often called a cashel when built in stone, would have functioned as a defended or bounded settlement, and the clustering of small structures against its inner wall is a pattern seen at a number of early medieval sites across the west of Ireland, where households sheltered within a communal boundary. The hexagonal outline here is, however, distinctive enough to prompt a second look at the geometry of the place.