Hut site, Coomleagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coomleagh, Co. Kerry

High on the south-eastern slopes of Caunoge, in the uplands of the Iveragh Peninsula, a small circle of collapsed stone sits quietly in the mountain grass.

It is easy to miss, and easier still to mistake for a natural tumble of rock, but the arrangement is deliberate: the remains of a drystone hut, built without mortar by setting stone against stone, roughly 2.7 metres in diameter. A possible entrance opens to the east, and an early field boundary runs eastward from the structure, suggesting this was once part of a small but organised pattern of land use rather than a solitary shelter thrown up in haste.

The Iveragh Peninsula, home to the Ring of Kerry, has an unusually dense record of upland settlement, much of it poorly dated but clearly ancient. Structures like this one were typically associated with seasonal grazing, known in the Irish tradition as booleying, where people and animals moved to higher ground in summer months. The proximity to a group of sheepfolds nearby reinforces that reading. Whether the hut itself is prehistoric, early medieval, or from a later period of transhumance is difficult to say without excavation, but the early field boundary hints at organised agriculture stretching back well before the modern era. The site was documented as part of the archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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Pete F
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