Hut site, Teamhair, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a level terrace of boggy pasture west of Trusk, overlooking Ballinskelligs Bay, the low remains of a circular stone foundation sit quietly in the landscape, easy to walk past and easy to miss.
What survives is a drystone ring, a building technique using no mortar, where flat stones are carefully stacked and occasionally reinforced with upright slabs, measuring roughly six metres across and standing only about forty centimetres high at its tallest. A gap of just under a metre on the south-east side marks what was once the entrance, narrow enough that you would have had to duck or turn sideways to pass through.
This kind of structure is generally referred to as a hut site, a broad term covering the remains of simple circular dwellings found across Ireland, often associated with early medieval settlement or seasonal farming activity. The walls here are still about eighty centimetres thick, suggesting they originally supported a roof of timber, thatch, or turf, long since gone. To the west, an old field wall runs roughly north-west to south-east, hinting that this was once part of a worked landscape, with someone not just sheltering here but farming or grazing the surrounding ground. The place-name Teamhair, shared with the more famous Hill of Tara in County Meath, may carry its own significance; the word is sometimes associated with elevated, prominent places, which this terrace, with its long views out over the bay, certainly is.