Hut site, Clahane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the summit of Knockmoyle Mountain in County Kerry, what was once recorded as a hut site complex turns out to be something rather more ambiguous: the probable remnants of sheepfolds, built from stone robbed out of a much older cairn.
The two entries in the Record of Monuments and Places, added only during the 1997 update and likely identified from aerial photography, were never recorded in the earlier Sites and Monuments Record. That oversight is telling. Seen from above, the low circular and rectilinear shapes of dry-stone sheepfolds can read convincingly as ancient hut foundations, and the mistake is an easy one to make.
The cairn beneath all this is genuinely old, and what survives is still substantial. Circular in plan, it originally measured around 20 metres in diameter and still stands to roughly 1.5 metres on its western side, despite considerable robbing. A second, lower mound lies about 7 metres to the north, measuring 8 metres north to south and 10 metres east to west, though it may itself be a product of sheepfold construction rather than an independent monument. Knockmoyle sits on the western end of the Slieve Mish Mountains, flanking the high point of Scotia's Glen, a mountain pass that cuts through to the Lee and Maine Valleys. From the summit, two other cairns are clearly visible to the east, and the whole arrangement suggests a landscape in which elevated monuments were positioned with some awareness of one another. The research underpinning this account comes from Michael Connolly's Tralee Area Monument Catalogue, part of a PhD thesis submitted to University College Cork.
What the site illustrates, quietly and without drama, is how readily the historical record can be confused by later land use. Farmers repurposing prehistoric stonework for sheep enclosures is a thoroughly ordinary occurrence in upland Ireland, but the result here is a summit where ancient funerary monument and post-medieval pastoral infrastructure have become almost indistinguishable from the air, and where the official record took decades to catch up with what was actually there.