Hut site, Killelan, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of Killelan, looking out over Valentia Harbour, a pair of ancient stone huts sit largely unnoticed on an open mountainside.
What makes them quietly remarkable is not their setting but their construction: corbelled drystone, meaning the walls were built by layering flat stones in gradually inward-leaning courses until they formed a self-supporting roof, without mortar, without timber, without any binding material beyond gravity and craft. The two huts are conjoined and set onto a stone-revetted terrace, a deliberate levelling of the slope achieved by building up a retaining wall of stone. A narrow lintelled passage, just 0.7 metres wide, connects them internally, suggesting they functioned as a single, if compartmentalised, structure.
The larger of the two circular huts measures roughly 4.6 metres by 4.5 metres internally, a reasonably generous space by the standards of early Irish stone building. Its entrance is uncertain; stone collapse has filled much of the interior, obscuring where a doorway might once have opened to the east. The smaller, subcircular companion hut measures 5.8 metres by 3.6 metres. A third structure, rectangular in plan and probably later in date, abuts the eastern face of the larger hut, its entrance opening to the south. A sheepfold survives against that southern side, a reminder that the mountain was being actively worked long after whoever built the corbelled huts had gone. The sequence visible here, corbelled circular forms overlaid and extended by later, more angular structures, reflects a pattern found at a number of upland sites across the Iveragh Peninsula, where generations of use accumulated in stone without any single moment of construction or abandonment. The site was documented in the 1996 archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, which remains the principal reference for the wider peninsula.