Hut site, Com Na Heorna Thiar, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Com Na Heorna Thiar, Co. Kerry

High on the eastern slopes of Cahernageeha, near the head of a small tributary feeding down into the Coomnahorna river valley, there are the remains of what was once a modest human dwelling.

Small, roughly circular, and long abandoned, it sits in a landscape that gives little away about who built it or when. The structure is subcircular in plan, meaning it follows an approximately round but slightly irregular outline rather than a precise geometric shape, a form common across many centuries of Irish rural settlement. Its interior measures roughly 3.6 metres by 3.2 metres, a space barely large enough for a few people to shelter, sleep, or work.

The site was recorded as part of a comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula carried out by Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996. That survey catalogued the extraordinary density of archaeological remains across south Kerry, a landscape that has preserved field systems, enclosures, and structures from prehistory through to the early modern period. A second hut, also ruined, lies around 30 metres to the south-west, suggesting this was not a solitary structure but part of a small cluster of activity in what is now a remote and largely uninhabited upland area. Whether these were seasonal shelters used by those grazing animals on higher ground, or something more permanent, is not recorded.

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