Hut site, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry

On the slopes of An Bhinn Bhán, a white peak on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a circular stone structure sits half-buried in its own collapse, its ancient purpose quietly contested by the practical needs of modern farming.

The northern half of the hut has been adapted as a lamb shelter, giving it a double life that is entirely unremarkable in the Irish countryside and yet oddly affecting when you consider what it once was.

The structure is corbelled dry-stone construction, a technique in which stones are laid in overlapping horizontal courses that gradually incline inward to form a self-supporting roof or thick wall, requiring no mortar and no timber. The walls here are substantial, measuring 2.1 metres wide and surviving to 0.7 metres in external height, enclosing an internal diameter of 4.6 metres. An entrance gap opens toward the east-south-east. Inside, beneath the stone collapse that fills much of the interior, lies a slab bearing a small depression on one surface. According to the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, this slab may have served as a heel-stone for a door-post, meaning it would have held the base of a rotating door pivot in place, a modest but telling detail about how the entrance once functioned. The hut is incorporated into a larger enclosing element at its south-east, suggesting it was part of a more complex settlement arrangement rather than a solitary dwelling.

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Pete F
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