Hut site, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry

On the western shore of Lough Currane in County Kerry, a low scatter of collapsed stone in level pasture is all that remains of what was once a small oval hut.

Easy to walk past without a second glance, the structure survives only as a rough outline of foundations, its walls reduced to little more than a single course of tumbled masonry rising to about seventy centimetres at their highest point.

The footprint is modest, roughly four metres by three, with walls that were originally around two and a half metres thick, suggesting a solidly built, single-roomed shelter of the kind encountered widely across the Iveragh Peninsula. Structures like this are notoriously difficult to date with precision without excavation, but oval and sub-circular huts of this form are associated broadly with early medieval settlement in the west of Ireland, when small farming communities and hermitic figures alike built in stone on marginal ground close to water. Lough Currane itself, one of the larger lakes on the peninsula, sits in a landscape with a long history of human activity, and this quiet ruin is one of many such remnants recorded in the area. Its exact origins and the lives of whoever sheltered within it remain unknown.

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