Hut site, Derrylough, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrylough, Co. Kerry

Somebody, at some point, went to considerable trouble to build a small rectangular shelter on a north-facing slope above Kenmare Bay, and then levelled the floor by cutting half of it into the hillside.

That small act of practical engineering is about the most intimate thing that survives here. The hut measures seven metres east to west and just over three metres north to south, its walls now collapsed into a low ridge of drystone, still roughly sixty-five centimetres thick and fifty-five centimetres high. The interior floor was not simply laid flat; the southern portion was cut down half a metre into the upslope, while the northern end sits raised by about twenty centimetres, the two adjustments together producing something close to a level surface on ground that would otherwise tilt sharply away.

The site sits in rough, heather-clad hill pasture in Derrylough, with views down over Kenmare Bay and the Cloonee Lakes. Drystone construction of this kind, using unmortared stone laid in courses, was common across many centuries of Irish rural life, and without excavation it is impossible to say whether this structure belonged to the early medieval period, the post-medieval era of transhumance grazing, or somewhere in between. A relict field boundary survives close by, suggesting the hut was not an isolated shelter but part of a small agricultural landscape, now largely erased from the hillside. The people who used it were likely working this upland ground seasonally, moving livestock to the higher pastures in summer in a practice known as booleying, a form of transhumance that left scattered traces like this across the hills of Munster.

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Pete F
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