Hut site, Garranebane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, a low semicircular ridge of stone barely breaking the surface of the ground is all that remains of an ancient hut site at Garranebane.
It would be easy to walk past without registering what you were looking at, yet the proportions tell a clear story: an internal diameter of roughly four metres, with walls averaging nearly two metres wide and just over half a metre high. The thickness of the wall relative to the interior is striking, suggesting a structure built to endure rather than simply to shelter.
The site comprises at least two huts, the second positioned immediately to the west of the first. This pairing is not unusual in the Irish archaeological landscape; hut sites of this kind, sometimes associated with seasonal farming or early medieval settlement, are found across upland and coastal areas throughout Kerry. What survives at Garranebane is fragmentary but measurable, and the dimensions recorded by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan in their survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, give a sense of the original scale. The survey remains one of the most detailed regional archaeological studies carried out in Ireland, cataloguing hundreds of sites across a landscape that saw continuous human activity from prehistory through to the post-medieval period.