Hut site, Curragh More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Curragh More, Co. Kerry

On the southern bank of the Cummeenduff river, not far from the shore of Curraghmore lake in County Kerry, the remains of a small stone hut sit so low in the landscape that a passing walker might easily take them for a natural scatter of rock.

Only a single course of stonework survives above ground, tracing the outline of a subcircular structure roughly five and a half metres across. That near-circular form, modest in scale and stripped back to its foundations, is characteristic of early vernacular building in Ireland, where huts of this kind were constructed without mortar, the walls relying on the careful placement of local stone.

The site sits within the Iveragh peninsula, one of the most archaeologically layered stretches of southwest Ireland, where centuries of settlement have left traces ranging from megalithic tombs to early Christian enclosures. This particular hut was documented by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan as part of their survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press in 1996. The walls, where they remain, are about sixty centimetres thick, which gives some sense of how the structure would have felt from the inside: compact, low, and built with economy rather than ambition. Whether it served as a seasonal shelter for herders, a more permanent dwelling, or something else entirely is not recorded.

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