Hut site, Carrigawannia, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Carrigawannia, Co. Kerry

On a north-east-facing slope in the rough hill pasture of Carrigawannia, County Kerry, a circle of collapsed drystone just 2.2 metres across sits half-buried in overgrowth and scattered stone.

It is easy to overlook, and that is precisely what makes it worth attention. The surviving wall courses, still standing to around 0.7 metres in places and roughly 0.55 metres thick, describe the remains of a small circular hut, the kind of simple drystone structure, built without mortar, that appears across the Irish uplands and is associated with a range of activities from seasonal pastoral farming to early medieval habitation. A gap of about half a metre on the eastern side may once have served as the entrance.

What is quietly ingenious about the construction is visible in the southern portion of the interior, where the builders cut roughly 0.2 metres into the rising slope to create a level floor. On a hillside, that small act of engineering would have made the space significantly more liveable, or at least more usable. Rubble now lies both inside and outside the perimeter, the collapsed remainder of walls that were probably once considerably higher. The hut does not stand in isolation: two comparable sites lie close by, one approximately 30 metres to the east and another around 20 metres to the north-east, suggesting this hollow in the Kerry hills was once the location of a small cluster of structures rather than a single outlying shelter.

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Pete F
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