Hut site, Cloghanelinaghan, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a 1.7-metre stretch of carefully laid stone walling survives beside a north-west opening, and that modest fragment is just about all that remains to identify this as a hut site.
The qualification built into the archaeological record is telling: this section of walling "may represent" the remains of an associated hut. Archaeology at this scale is often a discipline of cautious inference, where a single well-built wall surviving in a field is enough to suggest that someone once sheltered here, even if the fuller picture has long since collapsed back into the ground.
The site sits in the townland of Cloghanelinaghan, on a peninsula whose landscape is dense with early settlement remains, field systems, and ecclesiastical sites accumulated across millennia. The Iveragh Peninsula, better known today as the Ring of Kerry, was surveyed comprehensively by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, whose findings were published by Cork University Press in 1996. That survey catalogued hundreds of sites across south Kerry, and this hut site appears among them, identified by its surviving wall fragment and its relationship to the north-west opening, or ope, beside which it stands. An ope, in this context, simply means a gap or aperture in a wall or structure, and the proximity of the hut walling to it suggests the two features were part of the same small complex, though the nature of that larger structure is not elaborated upon in what survives.