Hut site, Derrynafeana, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower western slopes of Slievanore, a scatter of tumbled stones barely thirty centimetres above the bog surface marks what was once a small circular dwelling.
The structure is modest almost to the point of invisibility: a diameter of just two metres, its walls reduced to their lowest courses, the whole thing half-swallowed by gorse. What makes it worth a second look is the quiet ingenuity preserved even in this ruin. Whoever built it compensated for the natural slope of the hillside by raising the western side of the floor by about fifteen centimetres, levelling the interior by hand so that the ground underfoot would be flat. That small, practical adjustment has survived long after everything else about the building has collapsed or been absorbed into the bog.
The site sits within a wider field system on the slopes above Lough Acoose, suggesting that this was not an isolated shelter but part of a working agricultural landscape. Circular stone hut sites of this kind are found across upland Kerry and were typically associated with seasonal grazing, a practice known in Ireland as booleying, where people and livestock moved to higher ground in summer months. The relationship between the hut and the surrounding field boundaries recorded nearby points to an organised use of this hillside, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date. The reference work by O'Sullivan and Sheehan, published in 1996, catalogued the site as part of a broader survey of south-west Kerry's archaeological landscape, placing it within a region extraordinarily dense with prehistoric and early historic remains.