Hut site, Tuar Sáilín, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Tuar Sáilín, Co. Kerry

On the lower southern slopes of Coomacarrea, a mountain in south-west Kerry, a small oval outline in the rough hill grazing marks where a stone-walled structure once stood.

It is easy to miss: the wall survives only as a jumbled lower course, rising to about half a metre and spreading roughly eighty centimetres thick, enclosing a space measuring approximately 2.8 metres from north-west to south-east and two metres across. Rushes have colonised the interior, and loose rubble rings the outside. What you are looking at is the bare skeleton of a building, stripped back to its foundations by time and weather.

The site sits above the valley of the Owroe River, on ground that would have offered a southward outlook and some shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather off the higher ridges above. Structures of this kind, small oval or sub-rectangular stone huts found on upland grazing land across Kerry and the wider south-west, are often impossible to date precisely without excavation. They may represent seasonal shelters used by herders during summer pasturing, a practice known in Irish as booleying, or they could belong to any number of periods from prehistory through to the post-medieval era. The dimensions here are modest even by the standards of such buildings, suggesting a single-roomed shelter rather than a permanent dwelling. Without further investigation, the question of who built it, and when, remains open.

The site lies on rough grazing land on the Coomacarrea slopes, so access involves uneven upland terrain. The Owroe River valley below provides a general orientation point for anyone approaching from the lower ground.

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Pete F
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