Hut site, Killelan, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killelan, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Killelan in County Kerry, a pair of ancient circular huts sit quietly beneath the footprint of three later sheepfolds, their original purpose absorbed by centuries of more ordinary pastoral use.

The older structures are corbelled and drystone in construction, meaning their walls were built without mortar, with stones laid in overlapping courses that taper inward to form a roof, a technique found across early medieval Ireland and associated with monastic, agricultural, and seasonal habitation alike. That more recent enclosures were simply built over the top of them suggests nobody was making a particular effort to preserve or erase what was already there; the landscape just kept being used.

The two huts are conjoined and connected by a short internal passage roughly three metres long. The larger of the pair, to the west, measures 3.1 metres by 2.6 metres internally, with walls surviving to a maximum height of just over a metre and a quarter. A narrow entrance, only half a metre wide, opens to the south-east. The smaller eastern hut is more fragmentary; only its lower courses remain, enclosing a roughly circular interior about 2.1 metres in diameter. Both sit among the traces of old field fences in rough upland pasture, a landscape that has seen continuous low-level agricultural activity over a very long period. The site was documented in detail by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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