Hut site, Raheens, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Raheens, Co. Kerry

On the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map, a small Irish word sits quietly against the landscape of Raheens in south Kerry: "Cloghaun", meaning a stone hut or small stone building.

That label marks the remains of a large circular hut, roughly 7.8 metres across, tucked into the north-eastern quadrant of a rath. A rath, in this context, is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by earthen banks and ditches, which served as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. The presence of a hut inside one is not unusual in itself, but the survival of the structure in any recognisable form, and the fact that it retained a name into the cartographic record, gives it a quiet persistence.

The hut's walls now survive only as a low bank of earth and small stones, standing around 0.4 metres high and averaging 1.2 metres in thickness. The northern side is the best preserved section, and local knowledge has identified what appears to be an original entrance on the south-western side. These details, modest as they are, sketch out a space that was once deliberately built and used. The site was recorded and described in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which brought together systematic documentation of south Kerry's early remains across a region where such sites are numerous but not always easy to read in the ground.

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Pete F
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