That is the full interior diameter of this ancient circular structure in Cooryeen, in south-west Kerry, barely enough space for a person to lie down diagonally. What survives is modest almost to the point of invisibility: a low ring of collapsed drystone walling, running roughly south to north, with the wall itself surviving to a thickness of about 0.6 metres and a height of just 0.2 metres. Loose stones are scattered to the north and south, the slow dispersal of a structure that was once, in some form, a place where someone sheltered or worked or slept.

The hut sits in the western half of a larger enclosure, a detail that places it within a familiar pattern of early Irish rural settlement, where small circular huts were often grouped inside or alongside enclosing walls, the whole forming a kind of farmstead. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful stacking and interlocking of stones, was common across Kerry and much of the west of Ireland, and structures built this way can be notoriously difficult to date precisely without excavation. The enclosure this hut belongs to is recorded separately, and together they suggest a small domestic site, perhaps used seasonally, perhaps the remains of a more permanent habitation whose full extent has long since returned to the landscape.