Hut site, Feaghmaan, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Feaghmaan, Co. Kerry

At Feaghmaan in County Kerry, set within the interior of a rath, there survives a small and easily overlooked structure that hints at the daily texture of early medieval life.

A rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that would have served as a farmstead or family settlement. What makes this particular site worth pausing over is the hut contained within it, positioned at the centre of the enclosure rather than against its edges, which is a placement that suggests it was the focus of whatever domestic activity once took place here.

The hut is subrectangular in plan, a shape that sits somewhere between the circular forms common in prehistoric building traditions and the more strictly rectangular structures associated with later periods. Its defining bank of stone still stands to a height of around 0.6 metres, and the interior, which is sunken below the surrounding ground level, measures approximately 4.2 metres by 1.5 metres. That sunken floor is a feature worth noting; digging down into the earth before building the walls was a practical technique that helped with insulation and drainage, and the slight hollow that results is often one of the clearest signs a hut site has left behind. The dimensions are modest, the space inside barely larger than a generous corridor, though such structures rarely existed in isolation and would have formed part of a wider complex of activity within the enclosing rath.

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