Hut site, Meggagh, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Meggagh, Co. Clare

On a west-facing pasture slope in Meggagh, County Clare, the grass has been quietly covering its secrets for centuries.

Beneath the turf, a low stony bank traces the outline of a subcircular hut, its interior just three and a half metres across, its outer edge extending to seven metres. The bank itself survives to only about sixty centimetres on its exterior face and a fraction of that on the inside, so there is no dramatic wall to photograph, no tower to silhouette against the sky. What remains is a subtle earthwork, the kind that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance.

The site sits within a small cluster of related remains that together suggest sustained early medieval activity in this corner of Clare. About thirty-one metres to the north lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early Irish farming settlements, where a household and its livestock would have been protected within a roughly circular boundary. Roughly fifty-seven metres to the west is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that early medieval communities used for storage and possibly as a refuge. The hut itself was likely a domestic structure within or near this wider settlement. At some point after the hut fell out of use, a field wall was built across its northern and eastern edges, the new boundary of a later agricultural landscape cutting through the footprint of an older one, with no apparent interest in what lay beneath.

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Pete F
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