Hut site, Inchincoosh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Inchincoosh, Co. Kerry

In the rough grazing land of Inchincoosh in south-west Kerry, a low oval of drystone walling sits against an outcropping of natural rock, and nobody can quite agree where the door was.

In fact, there is no apparent entrance at all, which is one of the small puzzles this site presents to anyone who encounters it. The structure measures roughly eight metres east to west and seven metres north to south, its partially collapsed wall still reaching a maximum height of about a metre in places, the southern side leaning into or using the bedrock as a natural boundary. Drystone construction, where stones are laid without mortar and rely on careful placement and gravity to hold their shape, was common across many centuries of Irish settlement, which makes dating a structure like this on appearance alone almost impossible.

What makes the site slightly less solitary than it first appears is its company. Two further hut sites lie within roughly forty metres to the east, suggesting that whatever activity took place here, it was not entirely isolated. Whether these represent a small working cluster, a seasonal settlement, or something else entirely is not recorded, but the grouping of three within such a short distance implies some degree of organisation rather than accident. The southern wall's use of natural outcropping rock is a practical detail worth noting; builders in this landscape frequently incorporated what was already there, reducing labour and making use of the terrain itself as structural support.

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Pete F
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