Hut site, Deelis, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Deelis, Co. Kerry

On the north-west-facing slopes of Deelis Mountain in County Kerry, a small rectangular structure sits in rough pasture, its walls partly collapsed but still legible in the landscape.

What makes it quietly arresting is not the building itself so much as its setting and company: the south-east wall is not a wall at all, but the vertical face of a natural rock outcrop, pressed into service as a ready-made boundary. Whoever built here worked with the mountain rather than against it.

The structure measures 5.3 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and just 1.7 metres across, making it narrow enough that two people lying head to foot would barely fit. The surviving drystone walls, a technique in which stone is laid without mortar and the weight of the structure holds itself together, stand to around 1.35 metres in height at their tallest, with a thickness of roughly 0.65 metres. A partially collapsed entrance, only half a metre wide, faces north-west. The hut does not stand alone. Another sits approximately six metres to the north-east, and two further examples lie around fifty metres to the south-east, suggesting this was once a small cluster of shelters rather than a single isolated dwelling. Whether these structures date to early medieval settlement, later transhumance farming, or some other period of use, the notes do not say with certainty, but hut sites of this type across Kerry are often associated with seasonal grazing activity, when people followed their livestock to upland pastures during summer months.

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Pete F
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