Hut site, Cappanacush, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At Cappanacush in County Kerry, there is a site that exists more completely on paper than it does on the ground.
Ordnance Survey mapping once indicated a small enclosure along the northern edge of the site, accompanied by two circular outlines in the interior that may have represented the remains of simple structures. None of this is visible today. No earthworks, no cropmarks, no tell-tale rise in the turf. Whatever was here has either been lost to agricultural activity, erosion, or the slow patience of the landscape reasserting itself.
The site belongs to a broader category of early settlement remains found across the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, where enclosed hut sites, sometimes no more than a low ring of stone or an earthen bank, were once a common feature of the farmed and grazed uplands. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented it as part of a comprehensive archaeological survey of the peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996, drawing together evidence from maps, field inspection, and earlier records. The two circular outlines noted in the interior were tentative readings even then, described as "possible structures" rather than confirmed features. That uncertainty, it turns out, was well founded.