Hut site, Cill Buaine, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Buaine, Co. Kerry

On the lower south-western slopes of Knocknaskereighta, in an area of pasture in the Cill Buaine townland of south Kerry, the grass has been growing quietly over a small mystery for a very long time.

What lies beneath is the sod-covered foundation of a rectangular hut, roughly built, measuring just 4.2 metres by 3.5 metres, with walls surviving to around 0.7 metres in height and 1.7 metres in thickness. It is a modest footprint, barely larger than a garden shed, yet the solidity of those walls suggests something more deliberate than a temporary shelter. Two further probable hut platforms sit nearby to the west, hinting that this was once a small cluster of structures rather than a solitary outpost on the hillside.

The Iveragh Peninsula, where this site sits, has been inhabited and worked for millennia, and the upland and marginal slopes of its mountains preserve the traces of occupation that lower, more intensively farmed ground has long since erased. Rectangular huts of this kind can be difficult to date without excavation; they could belong to any number of periods when people used the higher ground seasonally, perhaps for grazing cattle in the warmer months in a practice known as booleying, or for other kinds of marginal agriculture. The rough construction noted here is typical of structures built quickly and practically rather than for permanence, yet the walls' surviving thickness suggests they were meant to offer real shelter against the Kerry weather. The clustering of platforms nearby reinforces the sense that this was a working landscape, organised in some functional way that is now only partially legible from the surface.

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Pete F
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