Hut site, Fananierin, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On the lower north-facing slopes of Fananierin Mountain in County Wicklow, where the land drops towards the Drumgoff Brook valley and gives way to rough grazing, there is a circle of collapsed stones that was once a small hut.
It measures roughly four metres across, its wall now reduced to a low, tumbled arc no more than twenty centimetres high and about eighty centimetres wide, with a noticeable gap to the northeast that may mark where an entrance once stood. Nothing about it announces itself; it sits in open ground, easy to miss, looking at first glance like any other scatter of fieldstone.
What makes it more than incidental is its context. In 1937, the antiquarian Liam Price recorded a number of what he called "small rings of stones" in this part of the Wicklow uplands, and this hut site is among them. Price was one of the more careful observers of the Wicklow landscape in the early twentieth century, and his notes, later drawn on by Corlett and Weaver in their 2002 survey of the county, suggest that these rings formed a loose cluster rather than a solitary survival. Several related sites have been identified in the same general area, hinting at a pattern of small-scale, probably seasonal occupation on these slopes. Circular hut sites of this kind, built from dry-stacked stone without mortar, are found across upland Ireland and are often associated with transhumance, the practice of moving livestock to higher pastures in summer, though the precise date and function of any individual example is rarely easy to pin down without excavation.