Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing rocky slope in the rough hill pasture of Erneen, County Kerry, there is a small structure so modest in scale that it is easily mistaken for a natural feature of the landscape.

It measures only 1.7 metres east to west, and its entire eastern wall is not a wall at all but a single large boulder that someone, at some point, decided was good enough. That practical decision says something about the people who built and used places like this.

The structure is a D-shaped hut site, a category of small building found across upland Ireland and generally associated with seasonal pastoral activity, the kind of temporary or semi-permanent shelter used by those moving livestock to higher ground during summer months. Drystone construction, meaning walls built from stone without mortar, was the standard technique for such structures, and here the remains survive as a partially collapsed wall roughly half a metre thick and still standing about a metre high at its highest point. A smaller boulder is incorporated into the northwest section of the wall and forms one side of a narrow entrance, just 0.5 metres wide, on the western face. What makes the site a little more legible as a place of past land use is the relict field boundary that runs toward it from the east and terminates precisely at this hut, suggesting the two features functioned together as part of a broader, now largely vanished agricultural system organised across this hillside. The hut and the boundary between them sketch the outline of a working landscape, one oriented toward a river valley below.

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Pete F
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