Hut site, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, a small cluster of ancient stone huts sits in close company on the hillside at Canburrin, their walls still largely legible despite the centuries pressing down on them.

What makes the group quietly remarkable is not any single structure but the density of the arrangement: three huts, a mound of collapsed stone that may represent a fourth, and a curving arc of walling that at some point served as a sheepfold. The whole ensemble sits roughly seventy metres east of a related site nearby, suggesting this part of the landscape was once considerably busier than it appears today.

The most complete of the three huts is oval in plan and built using corbelled drystone construction, a technique in which courses of unmortared stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, gradually closing the roof without the need for timber or mortar. Inside, at the northern wall, a lintelled niche is set into the stonework, the kind of small recess that might have held a lamp or a few personal objects. The entrance passage, now collapsed, was set into the south-western side and measured just 0.7 metres wide, meaning anyone entering would have had to crouch or turn sideways. Immediately to the south, a second hut of subrectangular shape survives with its inner wall-face reinforced by a basal row of upright stones, a detail that suggests some care in construction despite the modest scale. A third structure to the east survives only as rough foundations, though it was noticeably larger than the other two, measuring roughly 4.5 metres by 2.6 metres.

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Pete F
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