Hut site, Cill Rialaigh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Rialaigh, Co. Kerry

Two large stone uprights rising out of rocky ground on the Iveragh Peninsula might, at first glance, look like the remnants of a prehistoric tomb.

That is precisely what a researcher named Lynch thought when he examined them in 1902, recording the structure as a cromlech, the older term for what we would now call a dolmen or megalithic burial chamber. The current reading is rather more mundane, though no less interesting: those same uprights, orientated north to south and set roughly two thirds of a metre apart, most likely mark the entrance to a ruined hut, one of countless small structures that once dotted this part of Kerry and whose function and date remain difficult to pin down without excavation.

The site sits on a south-east facing slope in rough, rocky terrain at Cill Rialaigh, about forty metres south-west of an early ecclesiastical enclosure. The two uprights average around 1.37 metres in height and are substantial pieces of stone, each roughly 80 centimetres wide and 36 centimetres thick. What little survives of the hut walls appears to have made use of whatever was already in the ground: bedrock and large boulders were seemingly incorporated into the base of the construction, with rough stone coursing laid over the bedrock on the northern side. A sheepfold was later built against the inner face of the walls, which is a reminder of how these old structures were continually pressed into new uses long after their original occupants were gone. The proximity to the ecclesiastical site raises the obvious question of whether the hut was ever associated with it, perhaps as a hermit's cell or ancillary building of the kind common to early Irish monastic settlements, but the physical evidence as it stands does not settle the matter either way.

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