Hut site, Mooghaun, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Mooghaun, Co. Clare

Within the vast enclosure of Mooghaun hillfort in County Clare, one of the largest Iron Age hillforts in Ireland, a small circular structure sits quietly in the south-western quadrant.

It is modest in scale, just 4.5 metres in diameter, and defined by a double-kerbed wall packed with rubble. What makes it quietly puzzling is the absence of any clear entrance feature; there is no obvious threshold or gap in the walling to suggest how, or indeed whether, its occupants came and went in any conventional sense.

The structure sits on level, relatively stone-free ground roughly 20 metres inside the outer rampart, positioned to overlook a steep slope falling away towards that boundary. It was recorded on a coloured large-scale Ordnance Survey plan dating to 1840, drawn at five inches to the mile, which places its documentation among the earliest systematic mapping efforts in Ireland. Eoin Grogan, writing in 2005, catalogued the site as part of broader research into Mooghaun hillfort, a monument whose outer earthworks enclose a substantial area of the County Clare landscape and whose origins belong to the late Bronze Age and Iron Age. A hut site of this kind, a small dwelling or working structure defined by low stone walling, would have been one of many functional spaces within such a large enclosed settlement, though the internal organisation of Mooghaun as a whole remains only partially understood.

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Pete F
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