Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On a hillside in Erneen, in south-west Kerry, the footprint of a small circular structure survives in a state of quiet collapse.

The hut measures just two metres in diameter, a space barely large enough for a single person to sleep in, and its drystone walls, built without mortar by stacking and fitting stone against stone, have fallen in on themselves over time, leaving rubble across the interior and spilling outward to the south-east. What makes the detail worth pausing over is the way whoever built this place dealt with the slope: the north-western portion of the interior was cut down into the hillside by about sixty centimetres, essentially levelling the floor by digging into the ground rather than building up the downhill side. It is a simple, practical solution, and seeing it recorded in the archaeology connects the ruin to a moment of ordinary decision-making.

The hut sits within a larger enclosure and is not alone. A second hut adjoins it to the north-east, suggesting that what survives here is the trace of a small cluster rather than a solitary shelter. Hut sites of this kind are found across Kerry and the wider Irish uplands, often associated with seasonal or pastoral activity, though the precise date and function of any individual example is rarely easy to pin down without excavation. The collapsed walls here still stand to a height of around ninety centimetres in places, and the wall thickness of roughly sixty-five centimetres gives some sense of how solid, if modest, the original construction would have been.

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Pete F
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