Hut site, Canagullen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Canagullen, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Glanmore River valley in County Kerry, a small D-shaped structure sits half-buried in boggy hill pasture, its grass-covered walls so low and unassuming that a walker could easily step over them without registering what they are.

What makes it quietly extraordinary is the care with which it was made. The walls, surviving to about 1.25 metres in height, are built of clay-mortared stone, faced on both the interior and exterior surfaces, and the builders cut into the hillside itself, deeper at the uphill end than the lower, to create a floor that sits level despite the slope. The result is an interior that lies below the surrounding ground, sheltered and deliberate.

The structure measures roughly 1.6 metres across its short axis and has a narrow entrance, only half a metre wide, opening to the east. It sits within a wider landscape of relict field boundaries, the faint outlines of an agricultural system that has long since ceased to function. Hut sites of this kind, small single-roomed shelters associated with transhumance or seasonal farming activity, are found across upland Ireland, often the physical traces of a practice known as booleying, in which herders moved livestock to higher pastures in summer and lived temporarily in simple structures like this one. Whether this particular example served that purpose or some other is not recorded, but its careful construction, with faced stonework and a deliberately levelled floor, suggests it was more than a temporary windbreak.

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Pete F
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