Hut site, Eskwacruttia, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Eskwacruttia, Co. Kerry

On the north-western slopes of Derrylooscaunagh, where the ground falls away towards the southern shore of lower Cummeenduff Lough, a low ring of stones sits quietly in the hillside.

It is subcircular in plan, roughly 7.4 metres by 6.3 metres, with walls surviving to about 60 centimetres in height and 80 centimetres in thickness. The downslope side is the better preserved of the two; on the south-eastern arc, a layer of accumulated sod has crept over the stonework and softened whatever definition once existed there. What remains is the footprint of a hut, modest in scale and anonymous in date, of the kind that would have sheltered a person or a small group engaged in seasonal work on the upper ground.

Structures like this are scattered across the upland margins of the Iveragh Peninsula, many of them connected to the practice of booleying, the old transhumance system in which cattle were driven to summer pastures on higher ground and tended by herders living in temporary shelters. The setting here, on a slope above a lough in a landscape that still feels remote, is entirely consistent with that pattern, though without excavation it is impossible to say with confidence when this particular structure was built or used. The site was recorded and measured as part of A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's comprehensive archaeological survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued hundreds of such remains across the peninsula and brought many of them to wider attention for the first time.

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