Hut site, Bunbinnia, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Bunbinnia, Co. Kerry

On a slope in Bunbinnia, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a small oval hollow in the ground marks the outline of a structure that was once, in some sense, a home.

It measures roughly three metres by two and a half, barely enough space for a few people to shelter, and its walls have long since subsided into themselves, leaving a ring of tumbled stone that requires a certain kind of attention to read as anything deliberate at all.

The site sits downslope from another recorded monument in the same townland, suggesting this corner of the Iveragh Peninsula saw sustained human activity over time rather than a single episode of settlement. Hut sites of this kind, roughly circular or subcircular dry-stone structures, are found across the uplands and coastal margins of Kerry and are associated with a range of periods and uses, from early medieval farming communities to later seasonal pasturing. The Iveragh Peninsula as a whole is extraordinarily dense with such remains, documented in a comprehensive archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996. The precise date of this particular structure is unrecorded, and without excavation it is difficult to say more than that someone once went to the trouble of building it, and that it stood long enough to collapse gradually rather than disappear entirely.

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