Hut site, Baile Uí Uaithnín, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile Uí Uaithnín, Co. Kerry

On a small hillock in Baile Uí Uaithnín, County Kerry, a prehistoric wedge-tomb occupies the summit while something older and more domestic sits just below it.

Tucked beneath that funerary monument is a circular drystone foundation, the remains of what was once a hut, its walls now low and largely buried under their own collapse. It is the kind of detail that passes unnoticed unless you are specifically looking for it, yet the layering of uses on a single small rise tells a quiet story about how the same patch of ground could accumulate meaning across long stretches of time.

Documented by Judith Cuppage in 1986, the structure measures 3.8 metres in internal diameter, with walls roughly 1.5 metres thick that survive to a maximum height of just 0.4 metres. Drystone construction, meaning stone laid without mortar, relies entirely on the careful fitting of one piece against another, and what remains here is a modest but legible ring of that work. The original entrance could not be identified. More intriguing still is what happened to the northern portion of the wall: it was overlain by a later wall forming part of a small rectangular enclosure that appears to have surrounded the hut at some point after its initial construction, suggesting the site was revisited and reorganised, though by whom and when remains unresolved.

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