Hut site, Eskwacruttia, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a low ring of ancient stonework sits quietly in the landscape at Eskwacruttia, the kind of structure that is easy to walk past without recognising what it represents.
What remains is the drystone foundation of a circular hut, roughly seven metres across, built using a technique that made the most of what the ground itself offered. Rather than importing every stone, whoever constructed it incorporated outcrops of natural bedrock directly into the walls, supplementing these with slabs set upright on their edges. The surviving walls stand only around thirty-five centimetres high and are less than a metre thick, but these modest dimensions are characteristic of foundations that once supported a much taller structure, likely of perishable materials such as timber, turf, or thatch that have long since vanished.
Drystone construction of this kind, built without mortar and relying entirely on the careful placement of stone, has a very long history in Kerry and across the west of Ireland generally. Circular hut sites of this form appear throughout the Iveragh Peninsula, documented in detail by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of South Kerry, which recorded this structure as sitting approximately eighty metres east of a related site. The use of bedrock as an integral component of the walls rather than simply a foundation surface is a practical response to a rocky landscape, reducing the amount of material that needed to be quarried or carried. It also tends to anchor these structures in ways that help them survive, however partially, across centuries or even millennia.