Hut site, Shehy Beg, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
On the slopes of Shehy Beg in County Cork, a small structure sits tucked against the outside of an ancient enclosure wall, its purpose and age unrecorded, its entrance no longer visible.
It is the kind of feature that passes unremarked, easy to walk past without realising there is anything to see at all.
The hut site was identified in January 2013 by Tony Miller, who noticed it while documenting a nearby enclosure on the same ground. Built against the exterior of the enclosure's southern perimeter wall, precisely where a run of contiguous, or adjoining, stone slabs occurs, the structure measures roughly 1.8 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west internally. Those are close quarters, scarcely larger than a modern box room. The walls have collapsed and now sit barely above ground level, and no entrance survives to suggest how or from which direction the space was originally accessed. Whether the hut was contemporary with the enclosure it leans against, or a later addition making opportunistic use of an existing wall for shelter or support, is not known. That ambiguity is part of what makes it quietly interesting: a small, ruined space that has not yet yielded its story.