Hut site, Creeveen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower western slopes of Knockastumpa in County Kerry, a small grass-covered bank barely knee-high marks what was once the wall of a rectangular hut.
It is easy to walk past, or to mistake for a natural irregularity in the hillside. The structure measures roughly 2.85 metres along its northwest to southeast axis and 2.6 metres across, making it a compact space by any standard. What gives it away as deliberate construction is the care taken to make it habitable: the northeastern portion of the interior was cut nearly three-quarters of a metre into the slope itself, levelling the floor against the gradient of the hill. The entrance, less than half a metre wide, faces southwest.
The bank that defines the hut is formed from earth and stone, with a sloping outer face, and survives best at the northeastern side. Rough hill pasture now covers everything, softening the edges, but the structure does not stand alone. Traces of a relict wall run immediately to the northeast, south, and west, part of a broader network of old field boundaries that once organised this hillside into something more purposeful than open grazing. Another hut site of similar character lies roughly fifty metres to the east-northeast, suggesting that this was not a single isolated shelter but part of a small cluster of occupation, a fragment of a landscape that was once farmed and lived in at some modest, forgotten scale.