Hut site, Bridia, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Bridia, Co. Kerry

In the Bridia Valley of south-west Kerry, tucked into one of the more remote corners of the Iveragh Peninsula, there is a hut site that represents the kind of trace people leave when they occupy a landscape for long enough and then move on.

Hut sites of this type, the collapsed or earthwork remains of small stone or turf shelters used by earlier populations, are scattered across the uplands of Kerry, and they tend to attract less attention than the more dramatic ring forts or promontory enclosures nearby. That relative obscurity is part of what makes them interesting. They are evidence of ordinary life, of someone deciding that this particular patch of ground was worth sheltering on, perhaps seasonally, perhaps for longer.

The Bridia Valley sits beneath the shadow of the McGillycuddy Reeks, and the wider area around it was catalogued as part of the Archaeological Inventory of County Kerry, a systematic survey of the peninsula's ancient remains compiled by Muiris O'Sullivan and Liam Sheehan and published in 1996. The hut site at Bridia appears in that inventory as entry number 708, one of hundreds of sites documented across south-west Kerry alone. The density of such records speaks to how thoroughly this part of Ireland was used and inhabited across many centuries, even in terrain that can seem, to a modern eye, impossibly marginal.

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