Hut site, Com An Bhóthair, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Com An Bhóthair, Co. Kerry

In rough wet pasture to the north-east of Derriana Lough on the Iveragh Peninsula, a low ring of large irregular boulders traces the outline of a structure that was once, in some era not precisely pinned down, someone's shelter or dwelling.

The foundations are subcircular, meaning roughly oval rather than a true circle, and the interior measures just 2.7 metres by 2.3 metres. The walls survive to a height and thickness of about 0.7 metres each. It is, by any modern reckoning, a very small space, and the boulders that define it have the look of things that were gathered and placed deliberately, not simply tumbled there by the landscape.

The Iveragh Peninsula has an unusually dense concentration of ancient field monuments, from early Christian enclosures to prehistoric stone structures, and hut sites of this kind are found across the upland and marginal ground of south Kerry. They tend to be difficult to date with precision without excavation, and this one is no exception. What the remains do suggest is a structure built in the simplest way possible, with a single course of large stones forming the base of a wall that would likely have been built higher in drystone or topped with organic material. The location, beside a lake in ground described as rough and wet, is characteristic of the kind of marginal terrain that was nonetheless occupied or used seasonally over long stretches of Irish prehistory and the early medieval period.

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Pete F
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