Hut site, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

At the head of the Carhan river valley in south Kerry, a boggy hillside holds the collapsed remains of two small circular huts, their foundations barely rising above the surrounding ground.

The structures are modest almost to the point of invisibility; the larger measures just 2.45 metres in diameter, the smaller only 1.85 metres, which gives some sense of how compressed and functional these shelters were. Built in the drystone technique, meaning without mortar, the walls were constructed entirely from carefully stacked and fitted stone, a method found throughout the Irish landscape from the early medieval period onwards and sometimes considerably earlier.

The site sits within a network of fields on a low-lying slope where the valley begins to flatten and the bog takes hold. That combination of field boundaries and hut foundations is a detail worth pausing on. It suggests a landscape that was once organised around some form of agricultural or pastoral activity, the huts serving whoever worked or sheltered here, whether permanently or seasonally. The Iveragh Peninsula, of which this part of Kerry forms a part, preserves an unusually dense concentration of early settlement evidence, and small drystone structures of this kind are among the more quietly abundant features scattered across its hillsides and valleys.

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Pete F
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