Hut site, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Settlement Sites
On the lower slopes of Sorrell Hill in County Wicklow, a cluster of six hut sites sits largely unnoticed on open mountain grazing land, slowly disappearing beneath layers of peat.
What makes this small complex quietly remarkable is not any single dramatic feature but rather the completeness of the picture it suggests: huts, clearance cairns, and field boundary walls all gathered within a tightly defined area, as though the whole routine of seasonal upland life had been pressed into the hillside and left there.
The complex is thought to represent booleying, the old Irish practice of transhumance in which farming communities moved their cattle to upland pastures during the summer months, occupying temporary shelters while the lower fields recovered. The evidence here, combining the hut sites with associated clearance cairns, where gathered stones were piled to clear ground for grazing or cultivation, and remnant field walls, suggests the settlement functioned as a coherent seasonal unit. Archaeologists consider it likely to date from the Early Christian period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, though the area was evidently still in occasional use much later: a NE-SW field boundary on the north-west edge of the complex is probably nineteenth century in date, and an L-shaped stone wall at the south-east end is thought to be a more recent sheep pen. The hut sites follow the edge of a well-defined scarp in a roughly linear arrangement, beyond which the ground drops into boggy, wet terrain. At least one of the structures, known as Hut C, survives only as a very low, peat-covered depression with an internal diameter of around three metres, while a nearby circular rise roughly eight metres to its east is probably the remains of yet another hut, its outline softened almost to invisibility by the encroaching bog.