Hut site, Carhoomeengar, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Carhoomeengar, Co. Kerry

On a peat-covered hillock above the headwaters of Kenmare Bay, a low circular bank of earth and stones breaks the surface of the bog.

It is all that remains of a hut, roughly 5.2 metres across, whose walls have slowly been swallowed by centuries of peat accumulation. The bank itself, just 35 centimetres high and 75 centimetres wide, would be easy to walk past without recognising it for what it is: the outline of a dwelling where someone once lived, worked, and almost certainly kept animals on the rough pasture that still surrounds it.

What makes the site particularly interesting is not the hut alone but its immediate landscape. About two metres to the north, there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. Roughly sixteen metres to the west, a relict field boundary survives, a ghostly remnant of agricultural organisation that once imposed a human geometry on this boggy hillside. Together, the three features suggest a small but coherent settlement, the kind of modest farmstead that would have been scattered across Kerry in the early medieval period, leaving behind only these faint, half-buried signatures in the ground.

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Pete F
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