Hut site, Lisleibane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the north-eastern slopes of Knockbrinnea, in the open mountain terrain of the Iveragh Peninsula, a small circular foundation sits quietly in the landscape.
It is easy to miss: a ring of drystone walling, built without mortar, rising only about sixty centimetres above the ground and measuring three and a half metres across. The walls themselves are roughly seventy-five centimetres thick. By any measure, this is a modest structure, yet that modesty is part of what makes it worth considering.
Drystone hut foundations of this kind are scattered across the uplands of Kerry, remnants of a pastoral way of life in which people, usually during summer months, moved livestock to higher ground and sheltered in temporary structures called booley huts. The practice, known as transhumance, was once widespread across Ireland and left behind exactly these kinds of slight, circular traces in the mountain terrain. The Iveragh Peninsula contains an unusually dense concentration of such sites, documented by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan in their 1996 survey of South Kerry. Whether this particular hut dates to the medieval period or to more recent centuries is not recorded, and the sparse physical remains offer few clues. That ambiguity is itself characteristic of these sites, which were built to be functional rather than permanent, and which the landscape has largely absorbed back into itself.