Hut site, Coomcallee, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coomcallee, Co. Kerry

On the north-facing slopes of Macgillycuddy's Reeks, above the Gaddagh River, a small rectangular outline sits in rough upland pasture, easy to pass over as a natural scatter of stone.

It is not. The collapsed walls of a drystone hut, built without mortar, still reach almost a metre in height in places, and the footprint, just 2.7 metres north to south and 2.2 metres east to west, gives a sense of how compact and deliberately made this shelter once was. Rubble from the fallen wall has spread along the perimeter and now obscures what was the entrance on the southern side, so the structure reads more as a low, irregular ring than a recognisable building.

Attached to the north end are the jumbled remains of a small rectangular annexe, roughly 2.2 metres wide but only half a metre deep, too slight to have been a room in any conventional sense, perhaps used for storage or for penning a small animal. A second hut site of similar character lies about fifteen metres to the north-east, suggesting this was not an isolated refuge but part of a modest cluster of occupation in this upland zone. Sites of this kind are associated across Ireland with seasonal or transhumance use, a practice known as booleying in the Irish tradition, whereby people moved livestock to higher ground in summer and lived in temporary or semi-permanent structures while there. Whether this particular cluster dates to the medieval period or is more recent is not recorded, and the exposed location, a cold north-facing hillside above a river valley deep in Kerry's highest mountain range, is unambiguous about the conditions whoever used it would have worked in.

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Pete F
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