Hut site, Bealdarrig, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Bealdarrig, Co. Kerry

Just above the road at Bealdarrig, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a small circle of stones sits in the landscape so quietly that it could easily be dismissed as a natural tumble of rock.

It is not. What remains are the ruined foundations of a circular hut, its walls surviving to no more than twenty centimetres in height and about sixty centimetres in thickness, with a measurable interior of roughly 2.7 by 2.5 metres. An entrance once faced east, a orientation common in early Irish vernacular structures, possibly for shelter from prevailing westerly winds, or simply to catch the morning light. The whole thing is modest almost to the point of invisibility, which is part of what makes it worth pausing over.

The site sits downslope from another recorded monument nearby, suggesting this part of the Iveragh Peninsula preserves a cluster of activity rather than a single isolated incident of settlement. Circular huts of this kind, built from stone with low, thick walls, belong to a tradition of small-scale dwelling or sheltering that stretches across many centuries of Irish prehistory and early history; without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date to any individual example. The Iveragh Peninsula as a whole is unusually dense with such survivals, its landscape having changed relatively little in ways that tend to erase or bury earlier remains. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented this hut as part of a comprehensive archaeological survey of south Kerry published in 1996, which brought systematic attention to monuments that had long been known locally but seldom formally recorded.

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Pete F
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