Building, Inchee, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Utility Structures

Building, Inchee, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope at Inchee in County Kerry, two drystone walls meet at a right angle and simply stop.

There is no roof, no fourth wall, no clear indication of what this structure was meant to become or once was. A doorway in the longer wall has been closed up at some point, and the interior has been cut back into the hillside on its uphill side, suggesting the builders were working with the natural gradient rather than against it. Loose stones lie scattered both inside and outside the remaining walls, and a mound of them is piled against the shorter wall's western face. A sheep path runs along the southern side, which may be the most use the place sees now.

Dated to the 18th or 19th century, the structure sits on a terrace of rough hill pasture, the kind of marginal land that saw a great deal of activity during those centuries as rural communities pushed further up hillsides to graze livestock or work smallholdings. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies instead on the careful placement of stones for stability, was the common building method across such landscapes in Kerry, partly because good stone was abundant and lime for mortar was not always easy to obtain. The longer east-west wall runs to 6.75 metres and stands 1.8 metres high, while the shorter north-south wall measures 4 metres. Both are 0.65 metres thick. That the walls have survived to a reasonable height, while the building itself remains fundamentally incomplete or ruined, gives the site an oddly suspended quality, as though the decision to abandon it was made partway through a morning's work and never revisited.

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Pete F
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