Hut site, Carn More, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
On the boggy uplands of Carn More in County Mayo, a small horseshoe of drystone walling sits quietly within a much larger enclosure, and nobody is entirely sure what it was for.
That uncertainty is part of what makes it worth thinking about. The structure measures roughly 4.5 metres east to west and between 5.5 and 6 metres north to south, with walls about 1.4 metres wide but only around 20 centimetres high at present. It opens to the south, and the construction is, by the assessment of those who have looked at it, rather crude.
The structure occupies the north-western quadrant of a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically built to protect a homestead and its inhabitants. Whether the horseshoe-shaped feature inside it was ever a dwelling is genuinely uncertain. When it was inspected in 1997, heavy overgrowth made close examination difficult, and the surviving remains were too ambiguous to settle the question. It may represent the footprint of a small hut, of the kind that would once have sheltered a person or a family within the wider protection of the cashel wall. Equally, it may simply have served as a sheep fold, a pen for livestock, which would explain the open southern end and the relatively low, rough walling. Both interpretations are plausible, and the evidence, such as it is, does not decisively favour either.