Hut site, Killelan, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killelan, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Killelan mountain in County Kerry, close to the cliff-edge west of Coosbrista, two ancient stone huts sit conjoined in rough pasture, their walls still largely intact despite centuries of exposure to Atlantic weather.

What makes them quietly remarkable is not just their survival but their construction: both are built using corbelling, a technique in which stones are layered inward and upward without mortar, each course slightly overhanging the one below until the structure closes into a roof. It is the same principle behind the famous beehive huts found elsewhere on the Iveragh Peninsula, and it speaks to a tradition of drystone building that made skilled use of the materials immediately to hand.

The two huts communicate with each other through a low lintelled passage, and together they suggest a purposeful, if modest, domestic or agricultural arrangement. The larger of the two, to the east, is subcircular in plan and measures roughly 5.1 metres by 4.5 metres internally, with walls that vary between 1.6 and 3.1 metres thick. Its eastern entrance is a low, narrow lintelled passage, just 0.6 metres high and 0.8 metres wide, requiring anyone entering to crouch or crawl. Inside the wall's northern sector, three small lintelled chambers may represent later additions to the original structure. A detail worth noting is the double lintel arrangement at the inner side of both the entrance and the connecting passage: in each case, the uppermost stone forms the base of a small wall-niche, a recessed shelf built into the fabric of the wall. The smaller, circular western hut measures roughly 4 metres by 3.5 metres internally, and at some point its interior was modified for use as a sheepfold, a reminder that these structures rarely remained static once their original purpose had passed. Stone debris now fills the interiors of both huts.

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