Hut site, Rathduff, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Rathduff, Co. Westmeath

On the east-facing shoulder of a hill in Rathduff, County Westmeath, a modest collection of earthworks has been quietly hiding in plain sight.

Despite sitting in reasonably good pasture, the site was never marked as an antiquity on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. What the 1837 edition did record was an area of rock outcrop, shown as a narrow rectangular shape, its western and northern edges defined by a townland boundary. Along the north-western side of that boundary, something unusual happens: the line between Rathduff and the neighbouring townland of Irishtown suddenly kicks outward in a distinct semi-circular curve, tracing the outline of an enclosure that the cartographers never thought to name.

That curve follows the remains of a sub-circular enclosure defined by a stone wall on its south-western to northern arc, where it doubles as the townland boundary, and by an earth and stone bank elsewhere, with traces of an external fosse, essentially a ditch running around the outside, still detectable in places. Inside, low earthen banks divide the ground into small rectangular and sub-rectangular plots, the kind of internal subdivisions that suggest organised occupation rather than casual land use. Towards the north-west, one feature stands apart: a small circular hut site, roughly ten metres in diameter, defined by a low earth and stone bank. The western half of the interior is more fragmented, possibly disrupted by post-medieval quarrying, since the whole site sits on natural rock outcrop. Cultivation ridges running north-east to south-west are visible in adjacent fields to the east and south, and two larger rectangular enclosures located about 45 metres to the east may have been associated with the main circular area. Taken together, the evidence points towards the remains of a small clustered settlement, a group of domestic structures gathered within a single enclosing boundary, of the type found across early medieval Ireland.

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Pete F
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