Hut site, Kimego, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower south-western slopes of Slievagh, above the sea-cliffs that drop towards Cooncrome Harbour on the Iveragh Peninsula, a low scatter of stones marks what was once a small rectangular structure.
It is easy to pass over, the kind of thing that reads as natural tumble until you look more carefully and notice the logic in the arrangement, the suggestion of corners and walls reduced to their footings.
The foundations measure roughly 3.6 metres by 3.15 metres, a modest footprint consistent with a single-roomed shelter or seasonal dwelling of the sort that would have served a farmer, herdsman, or fisher working this stretch of the Kerry coastline. What makes the site quietly interesting is not the building itself but its context. Old field walls survive nearby, and they appear to be contemporary with the structure, which suggests this was not an isolated refuge but part of a small, functioning agricultural landscape, now collapsed back into the hillside. The Iveragh Peninsula carries an unusually dense record of such early remains, and a site like this one, unremarkable in isolation, gains meaning from that broader pattern of settlement along a coastline that people have worked for a very long time.