Hut site, Ballynabrocky, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Ballynabrocky, Co. Wicklow

On a north-east-facing slope in County Wicklow, the low earthworks at Ballynabrocky are easy to walk past without realising what you are looking at.

What survives is a rectangular outline, roughly six metres by two and a half, defined by a bank no more than twenty centimetres high and eighty centimetres wide. It is modest almost to the point of invisibility, yet the arrangement of its features suggests a deliberate and considered piece of construction. At the northern end, two opposing gaps in the bank may represent entrances facing one another across the interior, and tucked against the northern angle is a small circular annex, about two metres across, with its own narrow entrance oriented to the north-west. That annex, added rather than integrated, gives the structure a slightly improvised quality, as though the original plan was modified to meet some practical need.

The site sits just two metres north of a second hut site of similar type, which raises the possibility that the two structures were used together, perhaps by the same small community or household at the same period. To the east, the ground drops away towards a small valley known as the Shaking Bog, a name that points to the waterlogged, quaking ground characteristic of raised or blanket bog, where the surface shifts underfoot. That proximity to boggy ground is a recurring feature of early settlement in upland Ireland, where communities balanced the need for reasonably dry footing against access to the resources, fuel, grazing, and water, that wetland margins provided. Without excavation, it is not possible to date the Ballynabrocky hut site precisely, but the form and construction are consistent with the kind of small-scale, lightly built shelters associated with seasonal or pastoral occupation in the Irish uplands across a broad span of prehistory and the early medieval period.

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