Hut site, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a north-facing slope above Kilmakilloge Harbour in south-west Kerry, a low earthen bank traces the outline of a rectangular room not much larger than a modern garden shed.
Measuring roughly 4.6 metres east to west and 2.6 metres north to south, the structure sits on a natural rise in what is now rough hill grazing, its defining bank largely swallowed by gorse and grass, rising in places to just half a metre. It is the kind of feature that a walker could step over without registering, yet the carefully piled stones visible against the interior of the eastern bank suggest this was once a deliberate and considered piece of construction.
A hut site of this type is exactly what the name implies: the ground-level remains of a small roofed building, the walls reduced over centuries to a rubble spread held together by accumulated earth and vegetation. Without excavation, it is difficult to assign a precise date or function. Such structures appear across the Irish uplands in contexts ranging from early medieval seasonal farming to post-medieval subsistence use, often associated with the grazing of cattle on higher ground during summer months, a practice known in Irish as booleying. The choice of a north-facing slope overlooking the harbour at Kilmakilloge is itself quietly telling, suggesting that whoever occupied or used this spot was oriented as much toward the water and the activity along it as toward the land behind them.