Hut site, Glanrastel, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A circle of drystone walling barely two metres across, cut into a hillside in south-west Kerry, is easy to walk past without a second glance.
The grass has claimed most of it. What survives, low and worn, is the shell of a circular hut site, its walls still legible on the north-west to south-west arc, elsewhere reduced to little more than a grassy ridge following the curve of what was once someone's shelter or working space.
The structure sits within the south-west quadrant of a larger enclosure, roughly twenty metres north of the enclosure's southern wall. Its builders worked carefully with the terrain: the hut is cut approximately 0.4 metres into the slope on the uphill side, and the material removed was used to build the wall up on the downhill side, creating a level interior in ground that would otherwise have tilted. The drystone wall, a construction technique using stone laid without mortar, survives to about 0.4 metres in height where it is best preserved, and is roughly 0.6 metres thick. A second hut site of the same general type lies about sixteen metres to the north, suggesting this corner of Glanrastel once supported more than one such structure within the same enclosure. Small circular hut sites like these appear across upland Kerry in association with enclosures that may have served as seasonal farming settlements, though the precise date and function of this particular example is not recorded.