Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In the townland of Cool in County Kerry, two small stone huts sit joined together, heavily overgrown and easy to miss.
What makes them worth pausing over is the construction: drystone walling, meaning the stones are fitted and stacked without mortar, relying entirely on the skill of whoever built them and the weight of the material itself. It is a technique found all across the Iveragh Peninsula, and it has kept structures like these standing for centuries, even as the vegetation slowly works to reclaim them.
The pair of huts are conjoined, sharing at least one wall between them. The more closely documented of the two, the eastern example, is roughly square in plan and measures 4.4 metres by 4 metres internally, a compact space by any standard. At the base of the inner wall-face, upright slabs have been set as revetment, a technique that reinforces the lower course of a wall by lining it with stones placed on their edge, helping to hold the structure together from the inside. That inner wall survives to a maximum height of 0.78 metres. The site lies approximately 33 metres northwest of what is recorded as an entrance, suggesting it sits within or near a broader enclosure or complex, though the overgrowth now makes the full extent difficult to read on the ground.