Hut site, Tullycommon, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Tullycommon, Co. Clare

At the great stone fort of Cahercommaun in County Clare, the main walls and their enclosures draw most of the attention, yet pressed against the outside of the middle rampart, on its southern face, sits a small structure that says something quietly interesting about how people actually lived around such places.

The remains of a subrectangular hut, roughly five metres north to south and two metres east to west, with a narrow entrance of about half a metre at the north-west, suggest a dwelling that was neither inside the fort's protected interior nor entirely outside its orbit, but tucked in a kind of threshold position, sheltering against the rampart's mass.

Cahercommaun is a cashel, meaning a stone-walled ringfort, and it is a particularly substantial one, with multiple concentric ramparts set on a cliff edge in the Burren. Hugh Hencken, who excavated the site in the 1930s, recorded this hut on a plan published in 1938, giving it the kind of precise architectural attention that preserved its outline long after the physical remains became difficult to read on the ground. This structure is one of several hut sites identified in the outer enclosed area of the cashel, a cluster that points to a settlement extending well beyond the innermost enclosure, with domestic life spilling outward into the spaces between the rings of stone.

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