Hut site, Cappaghkennedy, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
What looks, at first glance, like an ordinary patch of rough Clare pasture turns out, on closer inspection, to be something far older.
The only visible sign of this small hut site at Cappaghkennedy is a band of slightly taller grass, roughly one to one and a half metres wide, tracing a subcircular shape across a north-facing slope. Inside that ring, the ground flattens out and bare limestone bedrock breaks the surface. It is the kind of site that rewards patience and a low sun.
The site sits within a semi-karst landscape, where limestone lies close to or at the surface and drainage behaves unpredictably, producing the rough, uneven pasture typical of parts of County Clare. It forms part of a large, multi-period field system, meaning the surrounding land has been divided, worked, and reorganised across many centuries, possibly millennia. When the site was first recorded in 1996, a map annotation by Tom Coffey described it as a fort, and it was entered into the Record of Monuments and Places under the category of enclosure. A 1999 inspection revised that reading considerably. What survives is a hut site, a term used for the remains of a simple, usually circular or subcircular dwelling, defined not by any upstanding wall but by a subtle difference in the vegetation growing over its buried edges. The interior measures approximately six metres north to south and five and a half metres east to west, which is a modest but not unusual footprint for a structure of this kind. No date has been established for it.