Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

Near the peat-covered cliff edge of Valentia Island, a cluster of ancient structures sits in quiet disarray, divided by a single field wall running roughly north to south.

Six houses in various states of ruin, along with what may be a souterrain, a type of underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlement, occupy this windswept patch of ground. What makes the arrangement particularly telling is the apparent sequence buried within it: the buildings on the western side seem to predate those on the east, and a nineteenth-century rectangular house on the northern edge of the group belongs to a later field system that was itself laid down over an older one. The landscape here is palimpsest-like, each era writing itself on top of the last.

One structure in the group is especially well preserved. Immediately north of the main cluster, and possibly connected to it, stands a carefully built rectangular hut with corbelled drystone foundations. Corbelling is a technique in which stones are laid so that each course projects slightly inward over the one below, allowing walls and sometimes roofs to be formed without mortar. This hut measures roughly six metres by five and a third metres, with walls surviving to around sixty centimetres in height and approximately fifty-five centimetres thick. A possible entrance is located at the north-west corner. The southern wall has been partly obscured by a field boundary that cuts directly across it, one more sign of how later agricultural activity gradually absorbed and altered whatever came before. The archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, brought these structures together into a coherent record for the first time.

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Pete F
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