Hut site, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Kealduff River valley in County Kerry, a low ring of drystone walling protrudes from the surface of the blanket bog, marking the outline of a small circular structure that has sat largely unnoticed for centuries.

The wall, which reaches roughly 0.8 metres in height and half a metre thick at its most substantial, traces a circle about 5.3 metres across, its best-preserved arc running from the south-west to the north-east. Drystone construction, in which stones are laid without mortar and rely on their own weight and careful arrangement to hold together, was the common building method across this landscape for millennia, and here it survives precisely because the bog has crept up around it, insulating the lower courses from the worst of the weather.

The hut sits within a wider landscape that speaks to former habitation and land use. Surrounding it are relict field boundaries, the ghost outlines of an agricultural system that has long since been abandoned to rough hill pasture and bog. Whoever worked this land and sheltered in this structure left no written record, and the site has not been closely dated, but such hut sites are broadly associated with seasonal or permanent upland settlement patterns common across early medieval and prehistoric Ireland. One detail complicates the picture slightly: a semicircular arrangement of stones near the centre of the structure may represent a later addition, suggesting the site was used, modified, or revisited across more than one period.

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Pete F
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