Hut site, Carhan, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Carhan, Co. Kerry

Two low, overgrown mounds in the corner of an enclosure at Carhan in County Kerry are what remain of a pair of ancient circular huts, and they survive less through any act of preservation than through the slow mercy of grass and forgetting.

The mounds occupy the north-west and north-east quadrants of the enclosure, measuring roughly six metres and eight metres in diameter respectively, which gives some sense of the modest but purposeful scale of whatever domestic or sheltered life once took place inside them.

The huts were noted by Henry in 1957 as two further circular structures within the enclosure, and their identification with the surviving earthen mounds has been proposed on that basis. What Henry could not have anticipated, or perhaps could only note with regret, was that the original stone foundations had already been robbed out decades earlier. According to Donaldson, writing in 1956, the stonework was quarried away in the early 1920s to provide material for the construction of a nearby waterworks. It is a pattern repeated at sites across Ireland, where ancient masonry proved too convenient to ignore when a building project required ready-cut stone. The result here is that the huts no longer read as structures so much as absences, their outlines preserved in raised earth rather than in the courses of walling that once defined them.

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