Hut site, Coulagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coulagh, Co. Kerry

On the Coulagh peninsula in south-west Kerry, a small stone structure survives in a state that makes it easy to overlook and difficult to date, yet oddly difficult to dismiss.

The hut is tiny, roughly 1.5 metres by 1 metre internally, which is barely enough to lie down in. Its drystone walls, built without mortar, rise to around 1.2 metres and are a full metre thick, giving the whole thing a solidity that seems out of proportion to its modest footprint. A flat-lintelled doorway in the south wall measures just 33 centimetres wide and 80 centimetres high, meaning anyone entering would have had to crouch and turn sideways.

The most technically interesting feature is the corbelling in the north wall and the upper section of the south wall. Corbelling is a building technique in which successive courses of stone are each laid slightly inward over the one below, eventually meeting to form a self-supporting roof or wall-head without the need for timber or mortar. It is a technique with deep roots in early Irish building, appearing in structures ranging from Bronze Age tombs to early medieval monks' cells. Whether this hut belongs to an early medieval tradition of monastic or pastoral use, or to a later period of upland farming, is not stated in what survives of the record. What is clear is that the site does not stand alone: it sits within a wider field system, suggesting it was once part of a functioning agricultural landscape rather than an isolated hermitage or folly. Perhaps most intriguing are the traces of earlier foundations visible both inside the current structure and to its west, indicating that whatever was built here, something came before it.

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Pete F
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