Hut site, Tinnies, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At Tinnies in County Kerry, the most striking thing about a particular ancient hut is how little of it remains above ground, and yet how precisely that little has been measured and recorded.
The structure is roughly circular, with walls just twenty centimetres high, barely ankle height, and about a metre wide at the base. What survives is essentially a low ring of stone, sitting in the southern sector of a wider archaeological site on the Iveragh Peninsula.
Circular stone huts of this type are found across early medieval Ireland, often associated with monastic enclosures, seasonal farming settlements, or the kind of small agricultural communities that worked the landscape before and after the arrival of Christianity. The internal diameter here is 3.6 metres, a modest space, enough for shelter and little more. The thick walls, proportionally wide relative to the enclosed floor area, suggest a building method common to the region, where substantial rubble-filled construction was used to support a roof that has long since disappeared. The site was documented by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their archaeological survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a volume that catalogued hundreds of monuments across the Iveragh Peninsula and remains a key reference for the area. The hut carries a preservation order dating to 1938, one of the earlier such protections applied under Irish national monuments legislation, which suggests it was considered significant well before modern survey methods formalised its description.