Hut site, Tooreenmore, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Tooreenmore, Co. Kerry

On a slope in Tooreenmore, in the south of County Kerry, a small circular hut has been standing without mortar for longer than anyone can say with certainty.

It is built in the corbelled drystone tradition, meaning each course of stone projects slightly inward over the one below it, the walls gradually closing toward the top without any need for cement or binding material. The result is a self-supporting dome, a technique found across the Iveragh Peninsula and associated with early medieval and possibly prehistoric settlement in the Irish landscape.

The structure is modest in its dimensions: four metres in diameter, just over a metre high, with walls about 1.1 metres thick. The entrance, facing south-east, is 0.9 metres wide, low enough to require a person to stoop. Inside, an internal dividing wall separates the space, and on the north side of that wall there is a small niche set into the stone, the kind of recess that might have held a lamp, a vessel, or some object of daily use. This combination of features, the divided interior and the purposeful niche, suggests a structure more deliberately arranged than a simple shelter, though its exact function and age remain unrecorded. It sits immediately upslope from another recorded archaeological site in the same townland, placing it within what appears to be a broader cluster of early activity in the area. The survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, provides the baseline record from which the site's details are drawn.

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