Hut site, Tullig, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At Tullig in County Kerry, a low mound of grass-covered rubble marks what was once the interior of a rath, one of the thousands of circular enclosures built across early medieval Ireland, typically as a defended farmstead.
Set at the centre of that enclosure is a collapsed circular hut, its walls reduced to a broad, turf-smothered ridge but still legible enough to read as a building.
The hut measures roughly 6.3 metres north to south and 5.8 metres east to west internally, making it a reasonably spacious structure for its type. Its walls, though heavily collapsed, average around two metres in width, suggesting they were originally substantial. A gap of approximately 0.8 metres on the eastern side marks where the entrance once stood. East-facing doorways were a common feature of early Irish structures, broadly associated with orientation towards the morning sun and away from the prevailing westerly weather. The site sits within the broader archaeological landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula, which stretches along the southern coast of Kerry and preserves an unusually dense concentration of monuments from prehistory through to the early medieval period.