Hut site, Coarha More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coarha More, Co. Kerry

Beneath half a metre of fibrous peat on the southern side of Valentia Island, the remains of a small Bronze Age hut had been quietly disappearing for nearly three thousand years.

Before excavation in 1993, the only hint of its existence was a subcircular arrangement of protruding slabs and a slight eastward bulge in the ground near Reenarea Point, the kind of subtle surface disturbance that most walkers would step over without a second glance.

What the excavation revealed was a carefully considered, if modestly built, polygonal drystone structure, roughly 2.8 metres by 2.5 metres internally, with a subrectangular annex attached to its eastern side. Drystone construction means the walls were built without mortar, the stones shaped and stacked to hold their own weight, and here they survived to a maximum height of just over 90 centimetres, though the southern face had collapsed outward under the pressure of accumulated peat. The entrance, on the western side, was only 55 centimetres wide, flanked by a pair of low uprights and fitted with a threshold slab still in its original position; a fragment of the broken stone lintel above it also remained in place. Inside, the floor was laid with angular cobbles, and small lintelled drains, stone-covered channels running beneath the southern wall, carried water out of the structure. The roof was supported partly by the walls and partly by a single central post, the stone-lined hole for which was still identifiable. The annex to the east may have been roofed by corbelling, a technique in which successive courses of stone are stepped inward until they meet at the top, requiring no timber at all. Nearby, approximately thirteen metres to the south-west, lies an excavated fulacht fiadh, a type of burnt mound associated with Bronze Age cooking or industrial activity, suggesting this was a patch of ground that saw sustained use over time. Radiocarbon dates obtained from timber on the hut floor and charcoal from its construction layers placed the structure firmly in the Late Bronze Age, returning dates of 766 plus or minus 20 BC and 796 plus or minus 20 BC respectively. Among the material recovered from the floor were burnt timbers, charcoal, waste flakes of flint, and sherds of pottery, the quiet residue of ordinary domestic life preserved by the very peat that concealed the building from view for so long.

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