Hut site, Skeagh By.), Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
On a rough hillside above Schull Harbour in west Cork, the heather and gorse have done a thorough job of reclaiming what was once somebody's home.
The remains of a small oval hut, measuring roughly five metres north to south and four metres east to west, sit on the northern side of a natural east-west terrace with the harbour visible to the south. The structure is low, its walls surviving only as jumbled lower courses of stone, around forty-five centimetres high at their best, but the outline is still legible if you know what you are looking for.
Hut sites of this kind are among the more enigmatic features of the Irish landscape. Without excavation, they are notoriously difficult to date, and could belong to almost any period from the Bronze Age through to early medieval times. What survives here is the wall, best preserved along the south-east to south-west arc and the north-west curve, with a thickness of about forty centimetres. The interior, though obscured by rubble and overgrowth, appears to be slightly raised towards the south, by roughly thirty centimetres. Two stone slabs offer tentative clues about how the space was organised: a radially set slab at the south may mark where the entrance once was, and a second slab laid on an east-west axis in the southern quadrant hints at some kind of internal division, perhaps separating a sleeping or working area from the rest of the floor space. These are cautious inferences rather than certainties, but they give a sense of a structure that was more than a simple shelter, something arranged and inhabited with at least a degree of intention.
The site sits in rough hill pasture, and the vegetation that obscures it is part of what has preserved it. The wall courses that remain are fragile and easy to miss, low against the ground and blending into the surrounding scrub.