Hut site, Carrigskeewaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
On a narrow terrace cut into the steep north-east-facing slope of a rocky ridge above Carrigskeewaun, there is an oval patch of ground that may, or may not, be the remains of a building.
The wall that once defined it has sunk almost entirely into the sod, surviving now as a low, grass-covered mound no more than thirty centimetres high and roughly eighty centimetres wide, with stones barely breaking the surface. The enclosure measures about eight metres by six, and the southern side has largely disappeared, leaving a gap of around two metres where any entrance may once have been. Below the terrace to the north-east, the ground drops sharply to a tidal sea inlet and a wide spread of salt marsh. It is the kind of place that looks unremarkable until you notice how deliberately it sits in the landscape.
The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 or 1919, which suggests either that it had already faded beyond recognition by the nineteenth century, or that it was never considered significant enough to record. A few metres upslope to the south-west, the ridge rises a further three to four metres to its narrow crest, where a possible cashel sits overlooking this terrace directly. A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date, used variously for settlement or as a defended farmstead. The proximity of the two structures raises the possibility that they were built and used at the same time, part of the same small habitation. But the evidence is thin. Relict cultivation ridges, the low parallel earthworks left by spade-turned lazy-bed farming, are visible on the terrace and across the ridge, hinting at agricultural activity of some kind, though this too resists precise dating. The site is described cautiously as a possible hut site, and that uncertainty is honest: the remains are so degraded that function and date remain genuinely open questions.