Hut site, Tulaigh Fhialáin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Tulaigh Fhialáin, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Collybeg, close to the Inny river in County Kerry, two small stone huts sit side by side in the forestry, so thoroughly absorbed into the landscape that trees have taken root inside the larger one.

They are corbelled structures, meaning their walls were built with each course of stone projecting slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing the roof without a single piece of timber or mortar. It is an ancient technique, and these two huts carry it off at a remarkably intimate scale: the bigger of the pair measures just four metres across and stands two metres high, its walls over a metre and a half thick.

The larger hut faces east through a proper entrance passage, and its inner wall-face holds two lintelled niches, small recesses roofed with flat stones, whose purpose is not recorded but which suggest a space organised for use rather than mere shelter. The smaller hut abuts its southern side, a tighter space at 2.7 metres in diameter and now only 0.8 metres high, its interior choked with moss-grown stone collapse. Two upright slabs still flank its inner wall-face. Around both structures, old field walls survive in the immediate vicinity, hinting at a wider agricultural landscape that once made sense of these buildings. Whether they served as shelters for people, for animals, or for some seasonal activity on the Iveragh Peninsula is not recorded. They sit in the area known as Tulaigh Fhialáin, a placename that quietly anchors them to a local geography older than any map. The site was documented in the 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, which remains the principal source for what little is formally known about them.

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