Hut site, Inchincoosh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Inchincoosh, Co. Kerry

On a south-east-facing slope in the Kerry hills, so thoroughly engulfed by ferns that it can be difficult to make out at all, sits the collapsed shell of a small oval hut.

It measures just 3.4 metres east to west and 2.3 metres north to south, barely large enough to have sheltered one or two people. The walls, built in drystone, a technique using carefully stacked stones without mortar, have fallen to a height of roughly half a metre, and the eastern side is buried further under grass and heather. A narrow entrance, only 0.4 metres wide, faces south, and there is a slight gap in the western wall as well.

What gives the site its particular character is not the hut alone but its setting within a broader, now-abandoned landscape. It sits in a sheltered hollow above the Thureehouma stream, surrounded by the traces of relict field boundaries, the ghostly outlines of an agricultural system that has long since gone out of use. A second hut site lies just one metre to the north, suggesting this was once, in some form, a place where people lived or worked in proximity to one another. Together, the two structures and the field systems around them hint at a community that organised itself carefully across this rough hill pasture, choosing the hollow for its shelter and the south-east aspect for what light and warmth that slope could offer.

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Pete F
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