Hut site, Annagh Beg, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Annagh Beg, Co. Kerry

On a south-west-facing slope above the valley of the Flesk River in County Kerry, a small square of collapsed drystone walling just barely breaks the surface of the bog.

It is easy to miss, and that near-invisibility is part of what makes it worth pausing over. The remains measure roughly 2.2 metres north to south and 1.9 metres east to west, the walls reduced to a thickness of about 0.6 metres and a height of half a metre, with fallen rubble scattered around the perimeter and obscuring whatever lies beneath. Drystone construction, which relies on carefully fitted stones without mortar, is a technique with deep roots across the Irish landscape, and structures like this one represent the more modest end of that tradition, functional shelters rather than monuments.

What is quietly compelling about this particular site is that it did not exist in isolation. Approximately 50 metres to the west-south-west, a second hut site survives in similarly degraded condition, and around 40 metres to the north-west, stretches of relict field walls still trace the outline of an agricultural landscape that has long since been abandoned to rough hill pasture and encroaching bog. Together, these fragments suggest a small working settlement, people farming a marginal hillside with enough permanence to build in stone, before the land was given up. The bog, in preserving the lower courses of the walls even as it swallowed them, has done the double work of destruction and archive.

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Pete F
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