Hut site, Cloghanelinaghan, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cloghanelinaghan, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, an ancient hut site sits unrecorded on any Ordnance Survey map, its location known from archaeological fieldwork but not from any cartographic trace.

That absence from the maps is itself a quiet curiosity, a reminder that the landscape of early medieval or prehistoric Ireland contains structures that official surveys either missed or simply never got around to marking.

The site is a roughly oval structure with an internal diameter of approximately fourteen feet by nine feet, dimensions that suggest a modest, single-roomed shelter of the kind once used for seasonal habitation or pastoral activity. It was noted as less carefully built than a companion structure a short distance to the south, implying a certain roughness in its stonework or plan. Hut sites of this type, sometimes associated with booley settlements where communities moved livestock to upland grazing in summer, are scattered across Kerry's hillsides, though many remain poorly dated. This particular example was recorded in 1957 and later included in a comprehensive archaeological survey of South Kerry published in 1996.

Visitors hoping to seek it out face an immediate obstacle: when fieldworkers attempted access, permission was refused by the landowner. The site remains on private land, and that situation appears unchanged. It is the kind of place that exists more fully in the archaeological record than it does in any accessible landscape, present in a footnote, absent from the map.

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Pete F
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