Hut site, Bray, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Bray, Co. Kerry

On a hillside above Bray in south Kerry, two small stone structures sit side by side, their outlines still legible after what may be many centuries.

They are not the ruins of anything grand. Each hut was defined by a rectangular arrangement of upright slabs, the kind of construction that required planning and effort but left behind something modest in scale: one measures roughly 2.4 by 2.3 metres, the other 3.7 by 2.1 metres. The individual slabs average around 90 centimetres tall and 30 centimetres wide. What makes the site quietly arresting is its position, set directly on top of one of the broad cultivation ridges that spread across these slopes, suggesting that whoever built or used these structures was working land that had already been shaped by earlier agricultural effort.

The Iveragh Peninsula, of which this part of Kerry forms a part, preserves an unusually dense concentration of early remains, and hut sites of this general type are associated with seasonal or marginal habitation, often connected to pastoral farming on higher ground. The paired layout here, two adjoining enclosures built in the same technique, hints at related functions, perhaps shelter and storage, or two households working closely together. The cultivations ridges beneath them indicate that the land was at some point turned over to tillage, though it is not clear from what survives whether the huts and the ridges belong to the same period of activity or represent different episodes of use layered on top of one another.

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Pete F
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