Hut site, Brosna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the outer edge of an early ecclesiastical enclosure near Brosna in County Kerry, there is a small circular feature that does not quite belong to the religious landscape around it.
Roughly 4.6 metres north to south and 5.9 metres east to west, it sits pressed against the external bank of the enclosure, immediately to the south of west, its curved walls absorbed into the boundary as if the two structures grew together over time. Whether it predates the enclosure or was built in its shadow is the kind of question that makes the feature quietly interesting.
Ecclesiastical enclosures of this type, roughly circular or oval boundaries that once defined the sacred and functional space of an early Irish church site, are found across Munster and beyond. What makes this particular spot worth attention is the possible hut site folded into the enclosure's outer face. Recorded by O'Hare in 2000, the feature appears to represent a small dwelling or shelter, the sort of simple circular structure associated with early medieval settlement. Its incorporation into the bank suggests a close physical, and perhaps chronological, relationship with the religious site beside it. A circular feature at the same western edge of the enclosure was also noted on the Cassini edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, an early twentieth-century revision of the nineteenth-century survey series, lending the identification a degree of cartographic corroboration that field observations alone cannot always provide.