Hut site, Uragh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-east-facing slope above Lough Inchiquin in south-west Kerry, a low arc of tumbled stone breaks the surface of the bog with just enough regularity to suggest it was once a wall.
It is not a dramatic ruin; nothing here reaches above knee height. But the geometry gives it away. The remains describe a circle roughly 5.8 metres in diameter, and that modest footprint is the signature of a simple circular hut, the kind of single-roomed structure that served generations of people living or working at the margins of cultivable land.
The wall itself was built in drystone, meaning without mortar, with individual stones fitted and stacked by hand. Where it survives best, on the north-west to south arc, it still stands around half a metre high and is roughly three-quarters of a metre thick. The rest has collapsed inward or been swallowed gradually by the surrounding bog. Peat growth like this tends to preserve what lies beneath it while obscuring what remains above, which is part of why the protruding stonework here is readable at all. The site sits in rough hill pasture, the kind of ground that was never worth ploughing and so was never dramatically disturbed, which has helped the outline survive.