Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

On a boggy ridge on the eastern slope of Beenmore, at somewhere between 250 and 260 metres above sea level, a cluster of old stone huts sits quietly in upland pasture now used only for sheep grazing.

What makes the best-preserved of them particularly worth attention is a quality that is easy to overlook from a distance: it was built using corbelling, a technique in which stones are laid so that each course projects slightly inward over the one below, gradually closing the roof without the need for timber or mortar. It is a very old method, demanding considerable skill to execute in dry stone, and finding it here, largely intact, on an exposed Kerry hillside is the kind of thing that rewards anyone willing to look closely.

The hut itself is roughly rectangular, measuring five metres east to west and three metres north to south, though the eastern wall curves into a semicircular form. The exterior walls stand about a metre high and are generally half a metre thick, though the northern wall thickens to a full metre, which may reflect partial collapse or the presence of a second outer wall built along that side. No entrance is visible at present. Rushes fill much of the interior, with rubble and heather covering the western end. A tributary of the Behy river runs just five metres to the north. The wider complex is divided by that same tributary, with two huts lying to its north and the remainder, including this one, to the south. Coomnacronia Lake lies roughly 625 metres to the south-south-west, and on a clear day the elevated position opens views eastward down through the foothills of Drung Hill toward Dingle Bay, and across to Seefin Mountain.

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Pete F
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