Hut site, Baslickane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baslickane, Co. Kerry

On the western bank of the Finnihy river in County Kerry, a modest rectangle of ancient stonework lies almost entirely buried beneath the accumulated rubble of centuries of field clearance.

What survives of the structure is a single basal course of drystone masonry, visible only along its eastern edge, the rest smothered under the stones farmers have been throwing aside since long before anyone thought to record the site. That solitary row of unmortared stone is enough, however, to suggest the original footprint of a hut measuring roughly 11.5 metres north to south and 9 metres east to west, a space large enough to have sheltered people and perhaps livestock together.

Drystone construction of this kind, where stones are laid without mortar and rely on their own weight and careful placement for stability, was used across Ireland from prehistory well into the early medieval period, and attributing a precise date to a site like this without excavation is rarely straightforward. What can be said is that the hut sits in a level area of pasture, a practical choice for a settlement that would have needed workable ground nearby. The Iveragh Peninsula, on which Baslickane sits, is one of the more thoroughly surveyed archaeological landscapes in Munster, documented in a comprehensive survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, which first formally recorded this site among more than a thousand others in the region. The sheer density of such remains across Iveragh speaks to how intensively this apparently remote corner of Kerry was once inhabited.

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