Hut site, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry

On the lower slopes of Knocknaveacal in south-west Kerry, a small structure half-swallowed by blanket bog offers an unusually legible example of how people once solved the problem of building on uneven ground.

The hut is D-shaped, a form that used the bank of a small river as its straight southern wall, with a curving drystone wall completing the enclosure on the other three sides. Drystone construction means exactly what it sounds like: stones laid without mortar, relying on careful placement and gravity alone. Only the lower courses of that wall survive, collapsed and partly buried, but enough remains to read the original thinking.

The site sits in rough hill pasture on the north-east-facing slopes of Knocknaveacal, and the builders appear to have worked with the slope rather than against it. The eastern portion of the interior floor was built up by around 0.3 metres, while the western portion was cut into the hillside to roughly the same depth, producing a roughly level living surface inside what would otherwise have been tilted ground. The curved wall stands to about 0.5 metres in height and is approximately 0.6 metres thick; the straight southern side, formed by the riverbank, runs to 4.1 metres. The eastern arc of the wall was faced with stone on its outer side, suggesting some care was taken with at least part of the exterior finish. A separate enclosure lies 24 metres to the north, hinting that this was not an entirely isolated structure but part of a small cluster of activity on this hillside. No date has been established for the site, and without excavation it is difficult to assign it to any particular period with confidence.

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Pete F
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