Hut site, Cill Urlaí, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Urlaí, Co. Kerry

In the south-west corner of a steeply sloping field in Cill Urlaí, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, two low mounds of tumbled stone sit close together in the grass, easy to walk past without a second glance.

The larger of the two is all that remains of a small oval hut, roughly constructed, with walls still traceable to about sixty centimetres in height and eighty centimetres thick. Its interior is choked with stone collapse, and a north-facing entrance, less than a metre wide, is just about legible in the rubble. Beside it to the south lies a roughly circular mound of similar dimensions, its centre punctuated by protruding slabs, and thought to be a second collapsed hut of much the same type.

What makes this corner of a Kerry field particularly interesting is the tangle of identities it has accumulated over time. In 1937, a surveyor named O'Malley recorded what he called a graves site in this general area, though he placed it one field to the north, a discrepancy that has never been fully resolved. Even earlier, in 1902, a researcher named Lynch sketched what he described as a square hut near the townland of Coolaconan, and this site may or may not be the same place he was looking at. Old collapsed field walls and a dense scatter of loose stone across the same quadrant of the field suggest that whatever was here, it was more than a single structure in isolation. Whether these were simple shelters, seasonal enclosures, or something else entirely remains unclear, and the rough construction offers few firm clues about date or function.

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Pete F
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