Hut site, Dooneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Dooneen, Co. Kerry

On the steep southern face of Knocknadobar, a mountain on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, four drystone huts sit arranged in a rough square amid open mountain terrain.

What makes the group quietly remarkable is the variation among them: one circular hut has collapsed into a low mound of rubble, two rectangular structures survive only as foundations and low walls, and yet the fourth remains largely intact, its corbelled roof still standing to a height of 1.6 metres. Corbelling is one of the oldest structural techniques in stone building, in which courses of flat rock are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, until the courses meet and close the roof without the need for mortar or timber. That this example has survived at all, exposed on a mountainside, says something about the care with which it was built.

The four structures were recorded and described by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press. The surviving corbelled hut measures roughly 3.8 metres by 3.1 metres internally, with walls around 0.8 metres thick and an entrance a metre wide facing north-west. A sheepfold abuts that entrance, suggesting the hut was used, or at least re-used, in connection with pastoral farming on the mountain slopes. The smallest of the four structures, the rectangular ruin immediately south of the main circular hut, measures just 2.4 metres by 1.7 metres, with an east-facing entrance flanked by upright stones; it would have been a confined space by any standard. The group as a whole has no firmly established date, and without excavation it is difficult to say whether the huts are early medieval, post-medieval, or something in between. Their arrangement and construction methods place them within a broader tradition of mountain shelters and booley huts, temporary dwellings used by those who moved livestock to high pastures during summer months, a practice known as transhumance that was widespread in Ireland until the nineteenth century.

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