Hut site, Baurearagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a shoulder of rough hill pasture above the Baurearagh River in south-west Kerry, a circle of drystone walling barely thirty centimetres high marks the outline of a hut that most walkers would step over without a second glance.
The structure is modest almost to the point of invisibility: just 2.4 metres across, its lower course of large boulders partly swallowed by encroaching bog. Yet that very modesty is what makes it worth pausing over. This is not a monument built to impress; it is the leftover footprint of someone's shelter, reduced by time and weather to a low ring of stone on a hillside.
The hut is defined by a drystone wall, a construction technique requiring no mortar, relying instead on the careful interlocking of stones to hold its form. What survives is around half a metre thick and roughly 0.3 metres tall at its highest, with some of the founding boulders reaching 0.6 metres. The setting, on the crest of a ridge overlooking the river to the north, would have made reasonable sense as a position for a temporary or seasonal shelter, the kind associated with transhumance, the old practice of moving livestock to upland grazing during summer months, though the notes do not confirm that specific use. What they do confirm is that this hut was not alone: a second hut site sits just 15 metres to the east, suggesting that whoever occupied this hillside did so in at least a modest cluster rather than in isolation.