Hut site, Castlequarter, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On a steep south-facing slope below the stone rampart of a hillfort on Brusselstown Hill, County Wicklow, there is a hut site that may or may not still exist.
That uncertainty is not a caveat or a footnote; it is, in a sense, the whole story.
The site sits within a cluster of similar features, all of them tucked beneath the defences of the Brusselstown Hill hillfort, which is itself part of the larger Spinans Hill hillfort complex, one of the more substantial Iron Age enclosures in the Wicklow uplands. A hillfort typically consists of an area of high ground enclosed by one or more ramparts, and the presence of hut platforms on the interior slopes suggests these were not purely defensive structures but places where people actually lived. This particular example, roughly seven metres in diameter, was recorded by Grogan in 1989. When the area was inspected in November 2012, however, the site could not be located. Whether it has been obscured by vegetation, disturbed by later activity, or was always a tentative identification, the record does not say.