Hut site, Knockaneyouloo, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the western slopes of Been Hill on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a cluster of small stone huts sits in various states of survival, each built differently from its neighbour.
That variety is part of what makes the group unusual: within a single hillside setting you have a corbelled hut, a possible pair of conjoined circular structures, a rectangular foundation set with large boulders, and a fourth hut defined by closely set upright stones. They are not the remains of a single coherent settlement so much as a palimpsest, layers of use and reuse accumulated at the same spot over an indeterminate span of time.
The most complete of the four is a pear-shaped corbelled hut, a type of dry-stone construction in which courses of flat stones are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually meeting at the top without the need for mortar. This one retains a lintelled passage entrance, just 0.7 metres wide and 1.75 metres long, with two wall-niches cut into the interior and a stone-lined platform abutting it to the west. It stands 1.25 metres high and measures roughly 2.4 by 1.7 metres internally. Beside it, two circular hut sites are conjoined but largely obscured, partly by that same external platform and partly by a later sheepfold built over or against them, a detail that hints at how sites like this were quietly repurposed by later agricultural activity long after their original function was forgotten. The rectangular hut nearby, incorporating large boulders into its foundations, and the fourth structure, a circular hut whose southern sector is formed of closely set uprights with one large stone at the north-west that may have served as an entrance marker, round out a group that rewards close reading precisely because no two elements are quite alike.