Hut site, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a low rise in the pastureland above Lough Currane in south Kerry, there is, in practical terms, nothing to see.
A hut site once occupied this spot, and its existence is known today largely because nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded it on their maps, labelling it as a sheepfold. That label, and the absence of any surviving surface trace, together tell a small but telling story about how the past gets misread, then lost.
The second edition of the OS map, produced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, caught the site at a moment when it was presumably still legible on the ground, or at least within living memory of local use. Whether surveyors correctly identified what they were looking at is another matter. Structures that began as seasonal habitations or early enclosures were frequently reinterpreted as agricultural features by the time cartographers arrived to document them, and the sheepfold label may say more about the site's final use, or simply about a surveyor's best guess, than about its origins. The Iveragh Peninsula, of which An Bhinn Bhán forms a part, is archaeologically dense territory; the landscape around Lough Currane alone contains a considerable scatter of sites from various periods, and a hut site on a commanding rise overlooking the water would fit plausibly into patterns of early settlement documented elsewhere in the region.