Hut site, Teernahila, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Teernahila, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, a small stone hut survives in the townland of Teernahila in a state that is slightly paradoxical: carefully built, yet barely big enough to stand in, and largely buried under its own collapsed walls.

It is the kind of structure that rewards close attention precisely because so little of it announces itself.

The hut measures just 2.6 metres by 1.2 metres internally, making the interior roughly the size of a large wardrobe laid on its side. Its plan is subrectangular inside but reads as more or less circular from the outside, a combination that appears in various early Irish vernacular structures where the builder was working to practical rather than geometric ends. What is notable here is the quality of the construction: the walls, averaging 1.1 metres thick, are built in horizontal courses of thin slabs, a technique that requires both a ready supply of suitable stone and a degree of skill in the laying. The walls survive to an internal height of 1.25 metres, and the northeast-facing entrance is a metre wide. A significant amount of collapse now fills the interior, obscuring whatever floor surface or features may lie beneath. The structural details are drawn from the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued hundreds of such sites across this archaeologically dense stretch of Kerry.

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