Hut site, Barnastooka, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the south-west-facing slope of Barnastooka ridge in County Kerry, a small enclosure sits entirely absent from Ordnance Survey maps.
It is not a dramatic structure by any measure: a sub-circular ring of drystone walling, nowhere rising above twenty centimetres, its mossy stones barely distinguishable from the surrounding ground. The interior, roughly 2.75 metres east to west and 2 metres north to south, is level and grass-covered, just large enough to have sheltered a person or perhaps a small number of animals. That it survives at all, and that it was recorded at all, is quietly remarkable.
Hut sites of this kind are fairly common across upland Kerry, modest shelters built without mortar from whatever stone lay nearby, used by people working seasonal pasture or by those simply moving through the landscape. What makes this particular example more interesting is the narrow stone wall that connects it, intermittently and in a gently winding line, to a second hut site nearby, recorded separately as CH14. These linking walls, sometimes called boithríns or field connections depending on their function, suggest at minimum that the two structures were part of a single, if loosely organised, arrangement of activity on the ridge, rather than isolated accidents of the landscape. Whether that means shared grazing management, a routeway between working shelters, or something else entirely, the stones themselves do not say.