Hut site, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a boggy slope in Cashelkeelty in south-west Kerry, the outline of a small oval dwelling survives just above the surface of the ground, its lower stonework still holding its shape after what was likely many centuries of abandonment.
The structure is modest, measuring roughly six metres along its longer axis and four metres across, but the care taken in its construction is still readable in the remains. The builders cut the western end of the floor into the rising ground to a depth of around forty centimetres, then built up the eastern end externally to compensate, effectively levelling the interior on what would otherwise have been an awkward hillside site. It is a practical solution, quietly elegant, and entirely invisible unless you know to look for it.
The hut sits within the south-eastern corner of a larger enclosure, the kind of arrangement often associated with early medieval or prehistoric settlement in the Irish uplands, where families or small communities worked marginal land that has since been reclaimed by bog. The walls were built in drystone, that is, without mortar, with larger stones forming the lower courses and smaller rubble making up the upper sections. Much of that upper material has since collapsed inward, leaving a low mound of debris across the interior. The surviving wall stands between ten centimetres and seventy-five centimetres in height depending on where you measure it, and its thickness is around seventy centimetres throughout. The hut does not stand alone: a second hut site abuts its eastern wall from the outside, and a third sits roughly eight metres to the north-west, suggesting this was once a small cluster of related structures rather than an isolated building.