Hut site, Bunbinnia, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, two small stone enclosures sit close together in the landscape at Bunbinnia, their walls still standing roughly sixty centimetres high and eighty centimetres wide.
They are subrectangular in plan, each with an interior measuring about 4.4 metres by 2.2 metres, which is to say modest even by the standards of early Irish shelters. What makes them quietly interesting is a degree of uncertainty that archaeology has not yet resolved: they may be ancient hut sites, the kind of simple roofed enclosures used by people working or sheltering on marginal land, or they may be considerably more recent, perhaps connected with the agricultural or pastoral activity that shaped this part of Kerry in later centuries.
The structures were recorded as part of a systematic archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996. That survey catalogued the extraordinary density of field monuments across one of Ireland's most archaeologically layered landscapes, from prehistoric promontory forts to early Christian remains. The Bunbinnia enclosures appear in that catalogue alongside a related site immediately to their west, suggesting this small corner of the peninsula saw some sustained, if modest, human activity over time. Whether that activity belongs to the early medieval period or to the post-medieval rural economy remains an open question.