Hut site, Crohane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Crohane, Co. Kerry

On a rocky, south-south-west-facing slope in the rough commonage above Crohane in County Kerry, the collapsed walls of a small circular hut sit quietly in the landscape, easy to walk past and easier still to misread as a natural scatter of stone.

What gives it away is the geometry: an oval interior measuring roughly three metres east to west and just over two metres north to south, the remains of a drystone wall still standing to about 0.7 metres in places, and a deliberate entrance gap, 1.5 metres wide, facing east. A single large rock has been incorporated into the western wall, either as a structural convenience or simply because moving it would have been more trouble than building around it. The floor slopes gently down toward the south.

Drystone huts of this type, built without mortar and relying entirely on the careful placement of stone, turn up across upland Kerry in considerable numbers, and they speak to a long tradition of seasonal occupation in the hills. Herders, turf-cutters, and others working the high ground would have used shelters like this, sometimes for generations, constructing them from whatever the immediate landscape offered. What makes the Crohane site particularly interesting is that it does not stand alone. Three further hut sites lie within a very short distance, one only a metre to the north, another roughly eighteen metres to the south, and a third about twelve metres to the north-west. The clustering suggests this was not a single opportunistic shelter but part of a small, purposeful settlement or working station, a group of structures used together or in sequence across some stretch of time whose precise duration remains unrecorded.

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Pete F
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