Hut site, Keadeen, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Keadeen, Co. Wicklow

On the slopes of Keadeen Mountain in County Wicklow, a small square structure sits tucked into the rubble of a far older wall, its stones barely half a metre high and its interior no bigger than a modest garden shed.

What makes it quietly strange is not the structure itself but its position: someone, at some point after the great enclosing wall had already begun to collapse, chose to build within the debris, using the fallen mass as a kind of ready-made foundation or shelter for something new.

This hut site is one of eight clustered together as part of a larger prehistoric complex on Keadeen, a grouping that also includes a substantial enclosure and a standing stone. The hut itself measures just 1.8 metres in each direction, enclosed by a stone wall between 0.65 and 0.75 metres wide and surviving to around 0.6 metres in height. It sits in the north-western sector of the enclosure, immediately north of what may have been an original entrance gap into that larger structure. The relationship between the two is telling: the hut was built not alongside the enclosure wall but within its collapse, suggesting it postdates the enclosure's active use, though by how much is unclear. There is no obvious entrance to the hut itself, which raises its own quiet questions about how it was used and by whom. The site is referenced in Corlett's 2004 study of the area, which places these monuments within pages 80 to 90 of that work.

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Pete F
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