Hut site, Deelis, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a north-facing slope above the valley of the Drimminboy River in south-west Kerry, a small circular structure sits in rough pasture, its walls long since collapsed and grown over with grass.
The hut is tiny, just 2.3 metres in diameter, barely large enough for one person to shelter in. What gives it a quiet interest is the pragmatic engineering behind it: the builder did not level the ground but instead worked with the hillside, cutting into the upslope on the southern side and building up the earth on the northern side, creating a roughly flat floor on what would otherwise have been an awkward gradient.
The walls were built in drystone, a technique requiring no mortar, where carefully chosen and stacked stones hold their own weight through friction and balance. They survive to around 0.4 metres in height and are roughly 0.65 metres thick, figures that suggest a once-solid construction now softened by centuries of grass and weathering. The hut sits within what appears to be an older network of field boundaries, hinting that it was not an isolated feature but part of a wider pattern of land use and activity across this hillside. About 70 metres to the north-west lies a separate enclosure, another element in what may have been a small agricultural complex, though the relationship between the two features and the precise period to which they belong remains unrecorded.