Hut site, An Fearann Iarthach, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Fearann Iarthach, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Farraniaragh mountain in County Kerry, overlooking Darrynane Harbour, sits an enclosure that the Ordnance Survey Name Books once described as a 'large fort and burial place for children'.

That phrase alone carries a particular weight. The site, which measures roughly 24.4 metres north to south and 23.4 metres east to west internally, sits on sloping pasture and belongs to a class of early enclosures found across the Iveragh Peninsula, where the boundary between domestic settlement and ritual use was often less fixed than we might assume today.

Within the enclosure, tucked towards the north-east, lie the foundations of a second structure, subcircular in plan with an internal diameter of 4.3 metres. Its wall, about 0.9 metres wide, survives in coursed stonework to a height of roughly half a metre, and is revetted on the outside by upright slabs set on edge, a technique that suggests some deliberateness in construction rather than simple field clearance. The description of the wider site as a burial place for children connects it to a broader tradition across early medieval Ireland, where enclosures associated with settlements were sometimes used for the burial of unbaptised infants, known as cillíní, occupying a liminal space both physically and spiritually. Whether this site functioned in that way, or whether the name reflects later folk memory attached to an older, unrelated structure, is not entirely clear from what survives above ground.

A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented the site in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, which remains one of the most thorough records of the region's pre-modern landscape. The combination of an enclosure of this scale, a subsidiary hut with careful external revetment, and that quietly unsettling description in the Name Books makes this a site that rewards more than a passing glance.

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