Hut site, Cloghernoosh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cloghernoosh, Co. Kerry

On the lower south-eastern slopes of Brassel Mountain in County Kerry, a small circular ruin sits half-swallowed by the hillside, easy to miss and difficult to date.

It is not a fort, not a church, not a field boundary. It is simply the collapsed shell of a hut, measuring roughly 2.4 metres across and barely half a metre high where its walls still stand, with a thickness of around 0.7 metres. That compactness is part of what makes it curious. Someone, at some point, chose this particular fold of mountain ground and built a shelter just large enough for a person or two, tucking it deliberately into the slope as though borrowing warmth and shelter from the earth itself.

Structures of this kind, sometimes called clochans or mountain huts depending on their construction and period, appear across the uplands of the Iveragh Peninsula, that broad southwestern finger of Kerry that encompasses the Ring of Kerry. They are associated with a range of activities across many centuries, from early medieval hermitic use to seasonal transhumance, the practice of moving livestock to higher ground in summer, known in Ireland as booleying. Without more detailed excavation or dating evidence, this particular hut at Cloghernoosh cannot be firmly placed in time. What the physical remains do tell us is that it was built with some care, using the natural gradient as a structural aid, and that its walls, though now fallen, were substantial relative to the overall scale of the structure.

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Pete F
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