Hut site, Kilcorney, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
On a plateau of rough pasture in County Clare, a low ring of stone sits almost flush with the ground, easy to walk past and easier still to misread as a natural feature of the landscape.
It is, in fact, the remains of a circular hut site, its grass-covered wall enclosing an interior just 4.4 metres across, with an outer edge that is still fairly legible, particularly on the north-west and south-east sides. A gap of about a metre on the eastern side is thought to mark the original entrance.
What makes the site more than a solitary curiosity is its context. The hut does not stand alone; it sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it accumulated boundaries, enclosures, and structures across more than one phase of use, suggesting successive generations of people working and living on the same ground. Within a relatively small area, two enclosures lie to the north-north-west and north-north-east, and two further house sites have been recorded to the north-east and south-west. The nearest of these features is barely twenty metres away. Taken together, the cluster points to a small settlement, the kind of dispersed rural grouping that was common in early medieval Ireland, where individual households and their associated enclosures, rough stone walls forming a bawn or yard around a dwelling, were arranged loosely across workable land rather than concentrated in a nucleated village. The wall of this particular hut, between 1.4 and 2 metres wide but only 0.3 to 0.4 metres high as it survives today, is built of large stones, a construction style consistent with the vernacular building traditions found throughout the Burren and its fringes.