Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a saddle of rough hill pasture between two Kerry summits, Knockboy and Knocknamanagh, a shallow ring of stone breaks the surface of the bog.
It is easy to miss, and that is part of what makes it worth knowing about. The wall, grass-covered and barely thirty centimetres above ground level, traces a circle just two and a half metres across, the footprint of a structure so small it could fit inside a modest living room. That a human being once organised their life within this space, in exposed upland terrain, is what gives the place its quiet strangeness.
The site is one of three hut sites clustered in close proximity on this stretch of hillside, with two further examples lying roughly eight metres to the north and ten metres to the south-east. A relict field boundary, the kind of low earthwork that marks the ghost of an agricultural landscape long since abandoned, adjoins the site to the west. Together these features suggest a working settlement, however modest, at a time when this saddle between the hills was cultivated or grazed in an organised way. Hut sites of this kind are circular or oval stone structures, usually interpreted as the remains of small shelters or dwellings, and they appear throughout upland Kerry as traces of past land use that the bog has slowly moved to cover. The bog, in this case, has done the site a kind of favour: its growth has preserved the wall rather than eroding it, leaving a low but legible ring that protrudes just enough to be read by anyone who knows to look.