Hut site, An Rinn Iarthach, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Rinn Iarthach, Co. Kerry

On the southern slope of Hog's Head in County Kerry, sitting in rough upland pasture, there is a small circular stone hut that quietly refuses to give up all of its secrets.

Built using corbelled drystone construction, a technique in which stones are laid in gradually overlapping courses to form a self-supporting dome or beehive shape without mortar, it survives to a height of just under a metre, with walls roughly 2.3 metres thick. Those proportions tell you something: this was not a lightly built shelter. The interior, measuring about 4.6 by 4.3 metres, is largely filled with collapsed stone, and somewhere beneath that rubble, according to local tradition, lies the entrance to a souterrain.

A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically stone-lined, and associated in Ireland with early medieval settlement. They served various purposes, from food storage to refuge, and their presence here, if confirmed, would suggest this hut was part of a more complex and deliberate arrangement than its modest above-ground remains imply. The structure has been partially rebuilt at some point, though the original walling survives best on the south-western side. A gap on the south-eastern arc is thought to mark where the entrance once stood. The site appears in the 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, which catalogued the remarkable density of early remains across this often-overlooked stretch of Kerry coastline.

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Pete F
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