Hut site, Cathair Samháin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cathair Samháin, Co. Kerry

A small square outline in the rough pasture of the Iveragh Peninsula, its walls barely knee-high and its interior choked with fallen stone, is easy to walk past without registering what it is.

Yet the drystone foundations here, just 25 metres northwest of the stone fort known as Cahersavane, represent the footprint of a dwelling that once stood beside one of Kerry's lesser-known cashels, a circular stone enclosure of the kind common across early medieval Ireland.

The structure is recorded as a clochán, the Irish term for a small drystone hut, though the form here is unusual. Where clocháns are typically circular or beehive-shaped, this one is square with rounded corners, measuring roughly 4.8 metres by 4.4 metres. The walls survive to about 0.9 metres in height, with a thickness of 1.8 metres, suggesting they were once considerably taller. A gap of just over two metres on the southeastern side may mark where the original entrance stood. The relationship between this hut and the adjacent Cahersavane caher, a defended enclosure whose name derives from the Irish cathair, meaning a stone fort, points to a settlement pattern where domestic structures clustered just outside the main enclosure, a common arrangement in early historic Kerry.

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Pete F
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