Hut site, Slievemore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
On the lower south-western slope of Slievemore, the great quartzite ridge that dominates the north-west of Achill Island, a small D-shaped enclosure sits in the heather and bog, its walls still standing to between 1.2 and 1.5 metres in places.
It is a modest thing, roughly three metres across in either direction, built from medium to large field stones laid without mortar, the technique known as drystone construction. Sedges have colonised the interior. A narrow entrance gap opens on the east side, partly blocked now by stones that have shifted out of place. Appended to the outside of the main wall are two smaller additions: a low, square enclosure on the south side, and a C-shaped setting of stones on the west, each about two metres across. Neither is substantial, the southern one barely more than a loose arrangement of rubble, but their presence complicates any simple reading of the structure.
What the hut was actually for remains unresolved. Its construction looks relatively recent in character, and it may be one of six small structures recorded across this area of bog on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, spaced between 25 and 200 metres apart. Those same structures had vanished from the equivalent map by 1921. Possibilities include a booley hut, the kind of temporary seasonal shelter associated with the old Irish practice of transhumance, in which people moved livestock to upland grazing in summer; an animal pen; or a rough refuge for peat cutters working the bog below. Immediately to the north-east lies an older, trapezoidal stone structure of uncertain purpose, and there is some suggestion that the hut may have been built partly from stones taken from it. A second hut site of similar character lies about 100 metres to the south-west. The bog here has its own archaeology, layered and incompletely understood, and this small structure, unassigned to any particular century or use, belongs to that condition of productive uncertainty.