Hut site, Ranaghan, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Settlement Sites
On a gentle slope in County Westmeath, within the earthen circuit of an ancient ringfort, a small rectangular hut site sits quietly in pasture-land.
What makes it slightly unusual is not its solitude but its company: two further ringforts lie within 200 metres, one to the south-west and one to the north-east, suggesting this corner of the Irish midlands was once considerably more organised and inhabited than the open fields now imply. A ringfort, to give the quick version, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or settlement. Finding a hut site preserved within one is not extraordinary in itself, but the density of three such monuments within a few hundred metres of each other points to a settlement pattern worth pausing over.
The hut occupies the north-western quadrant of the ringfort and measures approximately four metres east to west, with an entrance roughly two and a half metres wide facing east, the traditional orientation that would catch the morning light and shelter the interior from prevailing westerly winds. To the south of the hut, a square enclosure of similar dimensions adjoins it, and a low earthen bank curves away from the north-eastern corner of the structure toward the ringfort's outer perimeter. This kind of internal subdivision, a small domestic building set against an enclosure that may have served as a pen or yard, is consistent with early medieval farmstead arrangements across Ireland, where the interior of a ringfort was carefully organised rather than simply walled off from the outside world. The site sits on the south-eastern face of a natural rise, with a high hill to the west offering a sense of being watched from above, and wide views opening out across the surrounding countryside.