Hut site, Oughtmama, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
On the eastern summit of Turlough Hill in County Clare, two small stone huts sit pressed against the inner southern face of a hexagonal enclosure, an arrangement that immediately raises questions.
The huts are built directly across one of the enclosure's original entrance features, which suggests they came later, inserted into a space that had already been defined by someone else's architecture. That kind of layering, one period of occupation folding into another, is easy to miss when the evidence amounts to little more than a low spread of grass-covered stone.
The enclosure they abut is hexagonal in plan, an unusual shape for this type of upland structure, and the huts share its construction method: thin stone flags laid in courses, the same material and technique repeated across what may be two distinct phases of use. The western hut measures roughly five metres east to west and four and a half metres north to south. Its eastern companion is traceable for about eight metres along the same axis, though its eastern end has been robbed out, the stones removed at some point for use elsewhere, leaving only a width of around two and a half metres surviving. They are conjoined, sharing a common arrangement, and they are not alone; several other hut sites are recorded abutting the inner face of the large enclosure at various points around its perimeter, giving the whole summit a sense of accumulated, incremental habitation rather than a single planned settlement.