Hut site, Shronebirrane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Shronebirrane, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slope of Tooth Mountain in County Kerry, a small circle of old stones sits half-swallowed by blanket bog.

What you are looking at is a hut site, roughly two and a half metres in diameter, its drystone walls, built without mortar from carefully stacked stone, still standing to around sixty-five centimetres at their highest point on the western side. The largest stones in the lower course push up visibly through the surrounding bog surface, while rubble from the collapsed upper courses lies scattered around the perimeter. It is a modest footprint for a human dwelling, but the scale is not the point.

What gives the site its particular quality is the company it keeps. A second hut site presses directly against this one along its eastern arc, and two further examples sit within eighteen metres to the west and south. Together they form a loose cluster on a gentle terrace of rough hill pasture, sheltered enough by the slope's south-easterly aspect to suggest this was not accidental settlement. Hut sites of this kind are found widely across upland Ireland and are generally associated with seasonal pastoral activity, the practice of moving livestock to higher ground in summer, known in Irish tradition as booleying, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date or function to any individual example. The blanket bog that now encases the lower stonework has been accumulating for centuries, and in some ways it is the bog that has preserved what remains.

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Pete F
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