Hut site, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-facing slope above the valley of the Kealduff River in south-west Kerry, a low circular mound sits in rough hill pasture, half-swallowed by blanket bog.
It is not especially dramatic to look at, but what it represents is quietly telling: someone once chose this precise spot, with its outlook over the valley below, to build a home or a seasonal shelter, and then surrounded it with fields.
The site is a hut site, a term used to describe the remains of a simple, usually circular dwelling, often associated with early medieval or prehistoric settlement and sometimes with transhumance, the seasonal movement of people and livestock to upland pastures. This particular example measures seven metres in diameter, defined by an earth and stone bank roughly eighty centimetres wide and seventy centimetres high, with external facing visible along the south-west to east arc. The interior is obscured by rubble, so little can be read of what once happened inside. What gives the site its particular character is its context: it sits within a network of relict field boundaries, the ghost of an agricultural landscape that has long since fallen out of use, and one of those old field walls runs directly up to the southern arc of the hut, touching it. The two structures belong to the same vanished system of land use, a pattern of enclosure and habitation that shaped this hillside before the bog crept in and the pasture went rough.