Hut site, Coollick, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Inside a ringfort in Coillick, Co. Kerry, a low curve of earth and stone marks what was once, in all likelihood, someone's home.
The remains are overgrown and ruinous, but their position within the southeast quadrant of the enclosure tells a quiet story about how these sites were actually used. A rath, to give the ringfort its Irish term, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, built predominantly in the early medieval period and used as a defended farmstead. The interior of such an enclosure was not simply open ground; it was divided, organised, lived in.
What survives here is a possible hut defined by a low bank of earth and stone, its outline softened by centuries of vegetation and collapse. Six and a half metres to the west, there is a second possible hut site within the same enclosure, suggesting the interior was once shared between more than one structure. Early medieval raths frequently contained multiple buildings serving different functions, from sleeping quarters to byres for cattle, and the spatial relationship between these two remains hints at that kind of domestic arrangement, however faintly legible it now is. The parent rath itself is a separate recorded monument, and it is within that wider context that these hut traces make most sense.