Hut site, Baurearagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baurearagh, Co. Kerry

On a south-east-facing slope above the valley of the Baurearagh River, a circle of stones barely thirty centimetres above the ground marks what was once a small dwelling.

The hut's footprint is modest, just 2.8 metres in diameter, and the drystone wall that defines it, built without mortar by carefully stacking and fitting stones, has largely collapsed, its upper courses now scattered downhill to the south-east. The lower stones protrude through the bog, and a few loose pieces remain within the interior. It is the kind of structure that rewards a patient eye; at first glance the arrangement reads as nothing more than a slight disturbance in the hillside.

What makes the site more than an isolated curiosity is the company it keeps. Two further hut sites sit close by, one approximately 21 metres to the east and another around 40 metres to the north-west, suggesting that this was not a solitary shelter but part of a small cluster of activity on the hillside. Immediately to the north, the traces of a relict field wall survive, the remnant of a boundary that once organised the land around these structures. The technique of construction, cutting the wall slightly into the upslope on the north-west side while building it up on the south-east, is a practical response to the gradient, levelling the floor and offering some protection from the prevailing weather. Taken together, the huts and the field wall point towards seasonal or semi-permanent occupation, the kind of dispersed upland settlement that was once common across Kerry and much of the west of Ireland, where people and livestock moved to higher ground during summer months in a practice known as booleying.

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Pete F
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