Hut site, Cores, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cores, Co. Kerry

Up on the rough hill pasture above Friar's Glen in County Kerry, a small rectangular structure sits in the blanket bog, its walls still standing to roughly knee height.

What makes it quietly unusual is the combination of its form and its neighbour: the hut is built in a rectilinear plan at a time and in a landscape more commonly associated with the round or corbelled stone buildings known as clochans, and one of those, a clochan, sits immediately to its south-west. A clochan is a drystone beehive-shaped hut, built without mortar, the stones corbelled inward until they meet at the top, a technique used in Ireland from the early medieval period onwards and found in particular concentration in the Kerry uplands.

The hut itself measures 5.8 metres north to south and 2.7 metres east to west, defined by a drystone wall roughly 60 centimetres thick and still standing to about 70 centimetres. The entrance, a modest 50 centimetres wide, faces east. Loose stones lie scattered both inside and around the structure, the kind of spread that happens gradually over centuries as a wall sheds its upper courses. Whether the rectangular hut and the adjacent clochan functioned together as part of a single seasonal settlement, perhaps a booley site used during summer grazing, or represent different phases of use on the same ground, the notes do not say. The association is suggestive without being conclusive.

The site overlooks Friar's Glen, a topographical detail that carries its own quiet weight. Glen names with ecclesiastical associations in Kerry frequently point toward early Christian activity in the surrounding landscape, and the proximity of both hut types here, rectangular and corbelled, hints at a pattern of habitation and land use that stretched across a long stretch of time on these hillsides.

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Pete F
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