Hut site, Cummeenduvasig, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a ridge above the Owbaun River valley in south-west Kerry, a circle of tumbled stones sits in rough hill pasture, easy to walk past without a second glance.
What it represents, though, is a domestic footprint so small it asks real questions about how people once lived on these uplands. The circular hut measures just 2.2 metres in diameter, its drystone wall, built without mortar by stacking and fitting stones against one another, now collapsed to a height of roughly 0.3 metres and a thickness of 0.7 metres. The entrance, a metre wide, faces south-east, an orientation that would have caught the morning light and offered some shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather.
The site sits in a place called Cummeenduvasig, a name with the rounded, vowel-heavy quality of Munster Irish, in a landscape that has retained its rough pasture character rather than being absorbed into improved farmland or forestry. The hut is not alone here. A second structure lies immediately to the east, suggesting this was not a single isolated shelter but part of a small cluster, possibly the remains of a booley settlement where families or herdsmen moved seasonally with their cattle to upland grazing. Booleying, the transhumance practice of taking livestock to higher ground in summer, was common across Ireland well into the post-medieval period, and the modest scale of these huts fits that pattern, though the precise date of this particular structure has not been established.