Hut site, Keadeen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On the slopes of Keadeen Mountain in Co. Wicklow, a low oval of tumbled stone sits quietly absorbed into a modern field boundary, its prehistoric origins easily missed by anyone not looking carefully.
The structure is one of eight hut sites clustered together on this hillside, and what makes it particularly striking is not its condition but its company: the group forms part of a larger prehistoric complex that also includes a substantial enclosure and a standing stone, all within close proximity of one another.
The hut site itself is modest in scale, an oval measuring roughly nine metres north to south and six metres east to west, enclosed by a collapsed stone wall that was originally somewhere in the region of a metre high and up to 1.4 metres thick, with some noticeably large stone blocks still visible within the rubble. At some point, a modern stone wall was built directly across part of the structure, incorporating it into the outer angle of the new boundary, which has obscured any trace of an original entrance. No opening into the hut has survived, or at least none that can now be identified. Christiaan Corlett, writing in 2004, recorded this site along with its neighbours in detail, placing the group in the broader context of prehistoric upland settlement in Wicklow. Hut sites of this kind, essentially the stone footings of small round or oval dwellings, are a common feature of Irish upland landscapes and are generally associated with prehistoric or early medieval pastoral activity, though pinning down precise dates without excavation is rarely straightforward.
The site lies 55 metres to the south of the larger enclosure that anchors the monument group, so approaching that enclosure first gives a useful sense of the wider landscape before moving on to the hut sites scattered around it. The absorption of the structure into a later field wall is a reminder of how routinely prehistoric remains were pressed into service as convenient building material or boundary markers, leaving archaeologists to reconstruct what they can from what remains.