Hut site, Cappagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cappagh, Co. Kerry

On a south-west-facing slope above the valley of the Sheen River in County Kerry, a small arc of drystone wall barely clears the surrounding peat.

What it defines is a D-shaped hut site, roughly 1.8 metres across at its widest, with one straight side running for about 2.6 metres along the north-west. That straight edge is not an independent construction; it is formed by the south-east face of a relict field boundary, an older agricultural division that was absorbed into the structure of the shelter, or perhaps preceded it entirely. The wall itself is modest, only half a metre thick and thirty centimetres high, yet it protrudes just enough above the peat to be legible as something deliberate.

Hut sites of this kind are a common feature of the Irish upland landscape, small, often roughly circular or sub-circular shelters built without mortar, their walls relying on the careful fitting of undressed stone. They were used across a very long span of time, associated variously with seasonal grazing, the movement of cattle to summer pastures in a practice known as transhumance, or with agricultural workers and their families living close to the land they tended. The use of an existing field boundary as one wall of the structure is a practical detail that speaks to a working landscape, one already subdivided and managed before this particular shelter was raised within it. Some 25 metres to the south-south-east lies a separate enclosure, its relationship to the hut site unspecified but suggestive of a small cluster of activity on this rough pasture ground.

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Pete F
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