Hut site, Scarteen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Scarteen, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slopes of Knockleama in south-west Kerry, a circular stone structure sits half-swallowed by bog, its walls surviving to little more than knee height yet still tracing a near-complete ring across a peaty hillside terrace.

The hut measures seven metres in diameter, its drystone wall, built without mortar by stacking and fitting stones, remaining visible along the southern to north-eastern arc to a height of around half a metre and a thickness of roughly two-thirds of a metre. Around the rest of the circuit, where the wall has largely succumbed to the encroaching peat, stones still push intermittently through the bog surface, marking the line of the original structure for anyone patient enough to follow it.

What gives the site its particular interest is its context. The hut does not sit in isolation; it lies within a field system on the same hillside terrace, and approximately thirty metres to the north-east there is a separate enclosure. Taken together, these features suggest a small domestic and agricultural landscape, the kind of upland settlement that was once far more common across the Irish highlands before population shifts, land exhaustion, or changing farming practices led to their abandonment and eventual burial under accumulating peat. Rough hill grazing of the sort that covers the area today can preserve such remains remarkably well, simply by discouraging the deep ploughing or intensive development that destroys sites elsewhere.

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Pete F
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