Hut site, Foilmore, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a low circular mound sits at the north-western edge of a rectangular enclosure, its grassy banks patient and unassuming in the landscape.
It stands just over a metre high and spans roughly seven metres across internally, dimensions that place it firmly in the range of a domestic hut site, the kind of simple circular structure that served as shelter for people farming or living on marginal land during the early medieval period and possibly earlier.
The site consists of a rectangular area, likely an enclosure of some kind, with additional banks abutting its north-western side. These banks connect to the circular raised feature, which may represent the remains of a second hut. The conditional phrasing matters here: what survives is earthwork, not standing stone or mortar, and reading a vanished building from a rise in the ground requires careful interpretation. The site is recorded in Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the remarkable density of ancient remains across this part of south Kerry. That density is itself telling. The peninsula was far from peripheral in earlier centuries; it supported communities whose traces now appear as humps and hollows in fields and on hillsides across the region.