Hut site, Dromroe, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Dromroe, Co. Kerry

On a hillside above the Dromoghty River valley in south-west Kerry, a small D-shaped outline sits half-buried in heather and bog.

It is easy to miss, and that near-invisibility is part of what makes it interesting. The drystone wall that once defined the eastern arc of this ancient hut has collapsed to a height of only around thirty centimetres, yet it still protrudes above the surface of the surrounding bog, which tells its own quiet story about how dramatically the landscape has changed since whoever built this place last walked away from it.

The structure is modest in scale, measuring roughly 2.4 metres east to west. Its D-shape is not purely the work of human hands; the straight western side, running about two metres north to south, is formed by the natural face of an outcropping rock scarp rather than built stone. Whoever constructed the hut worked with the geology of the slope rather than against it, using the existing rock as a ready-made wall and completing the enclosure with drystone construction, a technique using stones stacked without mortar. A narrow entrance, just half a metre wide, sits at the centre of the curved eastern arc, facing downslope towards the valley. The site sits in rough hill pasture at the southern base of the rock scarp, on an east-facing slope, a position that would have caught the morning light and offered a view over the river below. No date has been firmly established for the structure, and hut sites of this kind in Kerry can range widely in age, from prehistoric through to early medieval and beyond.

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Pete F
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