Hut site, Tullystown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Settlement Sites
On a west-facing hillside in County Westmeath, beneath scrub and encroaching woodland, a rectangular building sits tucked against the inner bank of an ancient ringfort, its walls reduced to low, grass-covered footings that most walkers would step over without a second thought.
What makes the arrangement quietly odd is how deliberately the structure was positioned: its southern end is built flush against the ringfort's own earthen bank, just to the west of the original entrance gap. Whoever placed it there was working within the logic of an already-existing enclosure, using its boundary as a ready-made wall.
A ringfort, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland primarily as a farmstead or settlement. This particular example at Tullystown is heavily overgrown, its form blurred by vegetation, yet the house within it retains measurable traces: wall footings roughly 1.4 metres wide and 0.6 metres high, enclosing an interior space of five metres by four and a half metres. Two gaps break the walls, a wide one at the south-east corner on the east side, likely a doorway, and a narrower one near the middle of the west wall. A second ringfort lies around 90 metres to the south-west, suggesting this slope once supported a small cluster of activity rather than a single isolated enclosure. Some stones remain visible within the house's bank, though there is no evidence of dressed or coursed masonry; this was earthen construction, its fabric merging steadily back into the hillside.