Hut site, An Com, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Com, Co. Kerry

Tucked onto a slight terrace on the Iveragh Peninsula, a pair of conjoined stone huts look out in two directions at once, west over St Finan's Bay and east over Ballinskelligs Bay.

The views are extensive, but the structures themselves have fared less well. Both are poorly preserved and heavily overgrown, their roughly square outlines subsiding back into the land. The northern hut, around 2.3 metres across and still standing to roughly 0.9 metres in places, retains some upright slabs along the base of its inner wall-face. What makes it genuinely unusual, however, is the souterrain that opens off its western side.

A souterrain is an underground passage built from drystone walling, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. This one is L-shaped, its lintelled entrance a low 0.3 metres high and 0.55 metres wide, leading into a passage that runs west for 1.6 metres before turning south through a cramped creepway. Collapse blocks any further progress beyond that turn. The southern hut is even harder to read; its interior is entirely infilled with boulders, leaving only a vague outline measuring roughly 3.7 by 3 metres. A reference from 1902, by a researcher named Lynch, may identify this as the place he recorded under the name Gortnacaha, though the connection is uncertain. The site sits in a landscape already dense with early Christian and prehistoric remains, the kind of peninsula where the ground tends to give up something at every field boundary and headland.

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Pete F
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