Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a pair of ancient stone huts sit conjoined, half-swallowed by vegetation and their own slow collapse.

What makes the site at Cool quietly arresting is not grandeur but arrangement: two chambers built together, one accessible only through the other by means of a low communicating passage just over two metres long. That passage has since fallen in, sealing the relationship between the two spaces from easy inspection, but the logic of the design still reads in the remains.

Both huts are of drystone construction, a technique requiring no mortar, relying instead on the careful selection and stacking of stone to achieve stability. They appear to have been semi-subterranean, meaning they were set partly into the ground rather than rising fully above it, a feature that would have aided insulation and structural integrity in exposed Atlantic conditions. The inner hut measures 3.7 metres in internal diameter, a modest but workable space. The site is documented in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which drew together a systematic record of the remarkable density of early remains across South Kerry. The interiors of both huts are now largely filled with collapse, leaving the structures as low, overgrown mounds rather than readable enclosures.

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