Hut site, Sheshymore, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
In the Burren landscape of County Clare, a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort enclosed by a dry-stone wall, contains within its southern sector a hut enclosure that has, for practical purposes, vanished.
Not through collapse or erasure, but through growth. The site is there; it simply cannot be reached.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the hut enclosure in 1915, noting its position within the cashel's interior. Westropp was a prolific documenter of Clare's monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his observations remain a primary reference for sites that have since become difficult or impossible to inspect directly. When the cashel was visited again in September 1997, the problem was not ruin but abundance: a dense growth of hazel wood had made the interior entirely impenetrable. Whatever the hut enclosure's current condition, the woodland had effectively sealed it off from examination.
