Hut site, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Kealduff River valley in south-west Kerry, a low ring of collapsed drystone barely breaks the surface of the blanket bog.

It is easy to walk past, and most people do. What protrudes is the remnant of a circular hut, roughly five metres across, its wall reduced to a thickness of about sixty centimetres and a height of half a metre, the rest swallowed gradually by peat.

The structure sits within what were once field boundaries, now relict, meaning the enclosures have long since gone out of use and survive only as faint traces in the landscape. Together, the hut and its surrounding field system suggest a pocket of organised, settled land use at some point in the past, though the bog has since reclaimed the whole hillside. Blanket bog of this kind builds up slowly over centuries, layer by layer, and its preserving qualities mean that even poorly survived structures like this one retain enough form to be recorded and mapped. The site is noted as circular, drystone-built, and notably modest in scale, qualities that place it broadly within a tradition of upland pastoral settlement found widely across Kerry and the west of Ireland, where small communities or individual farmsteads worked marginal ground that was later abandoned.

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Pete F
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