Hut site, Derrygarriv, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrygarriv, Co. Kerry

On the north-facing slopes of Knockeirka in south-west Kerry, someone once took considerable care over a very small shelter.

The oval footprint measures just 4.4 metres east to west and 2.7 metres north to south, barely large enough to stand up and turn around in, yet whoever built it thought carefully about comfort. The southern portion of the interior floor was deliberately raised to counteract the natural slope of the hillside, a small but telling act of practical engineering in drystone construction.

The walls, built without mortar in the drystone tradition, have long since collapsed inward, leaving a low ring of stone roughly 60 centimetres thick and still standing to about a metre in places. A gap in the south-west section of this ring is likely the original entrance, oriented away from the prevailing weather of the open hillside. The site sits in rough heather-clad pasture within a sheltered hollow, and it does not stand alone: a second hut site of the same general type lies approximately 15 metres to the west, suggesting that what remains here is a fragment of a small cluster rather than a single isolated structure. Hut sites of this kind, found widely across the upland landscapes of Munster, are generally associated with seasonal occupation, possibly connected to the practice of transhumance, the moving of livestock to higher grazing ground in summer months, though dating individual examples without excavation is rarely straightforward.

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Pete F
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