Hut site, Cill Buaine, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a slope at Cill Buaine in County Kerry, a circular stone hut sits unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey maps, known locally not as a hut site at all but as a church site.
That discrepancy between official classification and local memory is itself worth pausing over. The structure is a corbelled hut, a type of dry-stone building in which the walls are built with slightly overlapping courses that lean gradually inward to close the roof without mortar or timber, a technique with deep roots in early medieval Irish monastic and pastoral life. This one was built to substantial proportions: walls roughly 1.5 metres thick enclosing an interior space about 5.5 metres across, with an entrance marked by upright slabs set on either side like low jambs.
The site was recorded by a researcher named Henry in 1957, who used the Irish term 'cellurach' to describe it, a word that typically refers to a small ecclesiastical enclosure or the remains of one, which may partly explain the local tradition of calling it a church site. Henry noted the corbelled hut alongside other features within what she understood as a broader enclosure, situated on the same hillside as another recorded monument roughly 320 metres to the south-west. By the time later surveyors came to examine the place, those internal features had become extremely difficult to read. The site had grown over with vegetation and, more significantly, had been used as a dumping ground for field clearance debris, the loose stones and boulders farmers remove when working the land. Where Henry had recorded a defined structure, later visits found only a stony spread of material covering an area about 12 metres across, the original form largely obscured beneath generations of casual deposit.