Hut site, Coomacullen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coomacullen, Co. Kerry

On the moorland above the Roughty River valley in south Kerry, a low ring of stone just barely announces itself above the bog surface.

It is easy to mistake for a natural feature, a slight thickening in the ground, until the curve of it gives the game away. This is the collapsed remnant of a circular drystone hut, roughly three metres across at its widest, its walls reduced to a grass-covered ridge no more than forty centimetres high. A narrow south-westerly entrance, just wide enough to admit a single person turned sideways, is still legible in the rubble.

The structure sits within a wider landscape of relict field walls, the ghostly outlines of an agricultural system that was once organised and intentional. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful fitting of stones against one another, is among the oldest building techniques in Ireland, and it survives here precisely because the bog has been so indifferent to it. The valley of the Roughty River in this part of Kerry is undulating and rough-pastured, the kind of terrain that was marginal even in periods of agricultural expansion, and the presence of field boundaries alongside the hut suggests a community that was farming as well as sheltering here, however temporarily or seasonally. Whether the hut was a permanent dwelling, a booley shelter used during summer transhumance, or something more utilitarian is not recorded, and the structure itself offers no clear answer.

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Pete F
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