Hut site, Mooghaun, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Mooghaun, Co. Clare

Mooghaun hillfort in County Clare is one of the largest Iron Age hillforts in Ireland, a site already layered with several thousand years of occupation before someone, sometime in the medieval period, quietly built a small house inside its ancient walls.

That detail, the reuse of a prehistoric enclosure as a domestic address centuries after it was first constructed, is what makes the hut sites discovered here so quietly telling.

The particular structure known as House 2 came to light during vegetation clearance in 1994 and was excavated the following year as part of the Discovery Programme's North Munster Project. It sits in the south-western quadrant of the hillfort, tucked between the inner and middle ramparts, with a cashel, a type of dry-stone enclosure, immediately to its south. The house itself is oval in plan, roughly six metres along its north-south axis externally, with an interior space of about 3.8 by 3 metres. Its walls were built in a double-kerb style, two parallel lines of stone with rubble packed between them, standing around 0.4 metres high and 1.5 metres wide. The entrance, less than two-thirds of a metre across, faces west-south-west and was carefully finished with small slabs set radially along each side; a single flat stone just outside the threshold may have served as a doorstep. Radiocarbon dating placed the structure's use somewhere between approximately 1275 and 1377 AD, firmly in the later medieval period. Two companion structures, House 1 and House 3, were excavated nearby, lying 17 and 34 metres to the west and west-south-west respectively, suggesting this was not an isolated shelter but part of a small cluster of habitation within the older monument's embrace.

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