Hut site, Tooreen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
On a south-westerly slope in Tooreen, County Cork, a scatter of stones arranged in a rough circle sits quietly beneath a covering of ferns.
The arrangement is slight, perhaps easy to walk past without registering, yet the outline it traces, five metres across, suggests the footprint of a circular hut, the kind of small domestic structure that once made up the everyday built landscape of rural Ireland across many centuries.
The site sits within rough hill grazing, tucked into a sheltered hollow where ferns have colonised the perimeter stones so thoroughly that the shape of the structure is largely concealed. What remains visible is an intermittent run of stones along the edge of the circle, none standing higher than about forty centimetres, none thicker than half a metre. Circular hut sites of this general type appear across upland Ireland, and their dates vary widely; without excavation it is rarely possible to say whether a particular example belongs to the prehistoric period, the early medieval era, or to the more recent practice of seasonal hill farming known as booleying, in which families moved livestock to higher ground in summer and sheltered in temporary structures nearby. The qualification of "possible" attached to this site reflects that difficulty honestly. The stones are there; what they once sheltered remains an open question.