Hut site, Cúm Dhá Stogha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cúm Dhá Stogha, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Knockavohaun, in the rocky upland terrain of the Iveragh Peninsula, two ruined stone structures sit apart from one another on the mountainside, their purposes and age unrecorded but their presence quietly insistent.

The smaller of the two is oval in plan, measuring roughly 2.4 metres by 1.6 metres, an intimate enclosure whose inner basal row of upright slabs has largely collapsed inward. A structure of these dimensions would have sheltered very little beyond a single person or a small animal, and the question of which it housed is not easily answered.

A short distance upslope to the north stands a far more substantial drystone foundation, subcircular in shape and nearly 8.1 metres by 7.9 metres across. Drystone construction, meaning stonework laid without mortar and relying on the careful fitting of each piece for stability, was common across many centuries of Irish rural and pastoral life, and structures like these on the Iveragh uplands are often associated with seasonal farming activity, transhumance, or early settlement. The Iveragh Peninsula, which forms the largest of the great fingers of land reaching into the Atlantic from south Kerry, has an unusually dense concentration of such archaeological remains, reflecting continuous human use of its landscape from prehistory onward. Whether these two huts were ever used together, or belong to entirely different periods of activity on the hillside, remains an open question.

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