Hut site, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry

At Cashelkeelty in south-west Kerry, a small circular structure sits half-swallowed by blanket bog, its lower stones still poking above the peat and grass after what may have been many centuries of slow submersion.

The hut is modest by any measure, roughly two and a half metres across, and what remains is only the base of a drystone wall, the kind built without mortar by stacking and fitting stones against one another. The upper courses have long since collapsed, and the rubble lies scattered around the outside edge of where the wall once stood.

The hut sits within the south-east sector of a larger enclosure, which suggests it was never a freestanding dwelling but part of a more organised arrangement of space, perhaps a settlement or a seasonally used farming compound. A second hut site lies only eight metres to the south-east, making it likely the two structures were used together, possibly by people who brought animals up to upland pasture during summer months, a practice known in Ireland as booleying. The blanket bog that now covers much of the site has, in one sense, preserved what remains, sealing the lower stonework against the kind of disturbance that more accessible monuments often suffer.

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Pete F
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