Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slopes of Barrerneen in County Kerry, a collapsed ring of drystone masonry sits quietly in rough hill pasture, easy to overlook and easier still to misread.

The structure is circular, just two and a half metres across, with walls that were once sixty centimetres thick and sixty centimetres high. Those walls have since fallen outward, scattering rubble downslope toward the south-east and west, which is a pattern often seen in abandoned drystone structures where there is no mortar binding the courses and gravity does its work over centuries.

What makes this small ruin more than an isolated curiosity is its context. It sits within a network of relict field boundaries, the ghostly outlines of an agricultural landscape that was once organised and maintained, and one of those old field walls actually meets the hut site at its western side. Two further hut sites lie close by, one roughly six metres to the east and another around seventy metres to the north-east, suggesting that what survives here is a fragment of a small settlement cluster rather than a lone dwelling. Hut sites of this type, simple circular structures built without mortar from locally gathered stone, are found across upland Kerry and are generally associated with seasonal or marginal land use, though dating individual examples without excavation is rarely straightforward.

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Pete F
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