Hut site, Cloghanelinaghan, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cloghanelinaghan, Co. Kerry

On the lower eastern slopes of Castlequin, in rough grazing land on the Iveragh Peninsula, a small ring of stone sits quietly in the landscape.

Roughly circular in plan and measuring approximately 4.5 metres by 4 metres, it is composed of upright stones and slabs set on edge, with two notably large uprights placed just 0.2 metres apart at the north-east. On the southern side, beneath accumulated overgrowth, there are traces of what may be coursing, meaning stones laid in horizontal rows to build up a wall, suggesting the structure was once more substantial than it now appears.

Sites like this are generally understood as the remains of a simple hut or small enclosure, the kind of modest, functional shelter that appears across upland and marginal ground throughout Ireland. They are rarely dateable without excavation, and this one is no exception. What gives it a quiet particularity is its setting and its survival, however partial, in ground that has never been much more than rough grazing. The archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, recorded it among hundreds of similar monuments scattered across this corner of County Kerry, a landscape that turns out, on close inspection, to be extraordinarily dense with the physical residue of earlier lives.

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