Field boundary, Canburrin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
At the head of the Carhan river valley in south Kerry, a bog-covered slope conceals something easy to miss entirely: the collapsed remains of two small circular huts, built without mortar, their stones now tumbled into low rings in the ground.
The larger measures just two and a half metres across, the smaller less than two. They sit within what was once a network of field boundaries, suggesting that whoever lived or worked here had also shaped the surrounding land into some kind of organised pattern.
Drystone construction, in which stones are carefully stacked and fitted without any binding material, was used across Ireland for centuries and in many different contexts, from field walls and enclosures to small shelters and seasonal bothies. The circular form of these two structures is consistent with early medieval building traditions on the Iveragh Peninsula, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date. The site was recorded as part of the comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, a project that systematically documented the extraordinary density of archaeological remains across this part of south Kerry. The boggy ground that now obscures the site has, in a sense, also preserved it, since waterlogged conditions tend to slow the decay of buried organic material and suppress disturbance from agriculture.