Hut site, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a boggy stretch of the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, three small drystone huts survive in varying states of submersion and decay.
None of them is much wider than a large room, and taken together they barely register against the surrounding landscape, yet their careful construction, walls built without mortar by fitting stone against stone, marks them as deliberate, purposeful structures rather than field clearance heaped into accidental shapes.
The three huts sit close together, each slightly different in form. The first is subcircular, partially swallowed by boggy soil, its interior now filled with rubble; a field wall runs up against its southern side, suggesting the site was later absorbed into a farming arrangement, or perhaps that the hut itself was partly built against an existing boundary. The second is oval, measuring roughly three metres by two, and retains the clearest sense of human intention: its entrance is still defined by two pairs of opposed stone slabs set facing each other across the threshold, a simple but deliberate framing of the way in and out. The third is roughly circular, its foundations low and overgrown. Drystone huts of this kind are found elsewhere on the Iveragh Peninsula and across the west of Ireland generally, associated variously with early medieval settlement, transhumance, the seasonal movement of people and cattle to upland grazing, or with later periods of rural hardship when rough shelter was built quickly from whatever lay to hand. The notes compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the peninsula record the group but do not assign a firm date or function, which leaves these three small structures sitting in a comfortable ambiguity, old enough to matter, specific enough to reward attention, but resistant to easy explanation.