Hut site, Carrignamuck, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Carrignamuck, Co. Wicklow

On a west-facing slope at Carrignamuck in County Wicklow, a small cluster of structures once sat in stony, uncleared pasture, the kind of rough ground that tends to preserve what tidier land destroys.

The main hut was subrectangular, meaning roughly rectangular with irregular corners, its interior measuring just 2.1 metres east to west and 1.8 metres north to south. The walls, about a metre wide and surviving to 0.6 metres in height, were built from rough stone but finished with more regular facing on the inside. Close by sat two possible hut platforms, the larger edged with small boulders and about 5 metres across, along with a natural rock cleft that had been roughly lined with boulders, and three small clearance cairns, the kind of low mounds formed when farmers or herders gathered surface stones to clear working ground, all within 10 metres of the huts. Together they suggest a small, self-contained working settlement, modest in scale but deliberate in its organisation.

When the site was first formally recorded in 1990, the structures were visible in the rough pasture. Within a few years, however, the surrounding area was planted with commercial forestry. A follow-up inspection in 2012 found that the hut, the platforms, the cairns, and the lined rock cleft had all disappeared from view above ground and were considered likely to have been at least partially destroyed by the planting activity. What had survived centuries of exposure to weather and grazing did not survive the machinery and root systems of a forestry operation. The site now exists primarily as a record of something that was there, briefly documented, and then lost.

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Pete F
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