Hut site, Mooghaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
Mooghaun in south County Clare is best known for its vast Iron Age hillfort, one of the largest in western Europe, and for the extraordinary hoard of gold objects discovered nearby in the nineteenth century.
Less discussed is the hut site that sits within or close to this same townland, a modest but telling trace of the people who once lived and worked in the shadow of those great enclosing ramparts.
Hut sites of this kind are the archaeological remnants of domestic structures, typically circular or oval in plan, defined by a low earthen bank, a ring of stones, or simply a slight depression where a floor once lay. They can range in date from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period, and their proximity to larger enclosures like Mooghaun's hillfort raises questions about settlement patterns, about who lived inside the walls and who lived just outside them. Mooghaun hillfort itself is thought to date to the Late Bronze Age, roughly the final centuries of the first millennium BC, making it broadly contemporary with the famous gold hoard, now largely held in the National Museum of Ireland, which was found by labourers cutting a railway line through the area in 1854.
Beyond its association with one of Ireland's most significant prehistoric landscapes, the specific details of this hut site remain formally undocumented in publicly available records. What can be said is that Mooghaun as a whole rewards careful attention. The hillfort's triple line of earthen ramparts is still legible on the ground, and the wider townland preserves something of the layered quality that comes from sustained human presence across several thousand years.