Hut site, Duagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Duagh, Co. Kerry

On a north-facing hillside above Duagh, half-swallowed by gorse and rough grazing fern, a small rectangular structure sits in near-total obscurity.

It is easy to miss, and easier still to dismiss, yet it represents a category of building that once dotted the Irish countryside in considerable numbers: a drystone hut, its walls built without mortar, relying entirely on the careful layering of stone to hold its shape against the weather.

What survives is modest but legible. The remains measure roughly 2.1 metres north to south and 1.6 metres east to west, making the interior space barely larger than a single bed. The drystone walls, where they persist, stand only about 0.3 metres high and are around 0.6 metres thick, their stones now tumbled and disordered into the kind of low, irregular scatter that fieldwork records describe as jumbled lower courses. The eastern wall has largely disappeared, and gorse has colonised the interior to the point where the floor level is no longer visible. The structure faces north, with an open prospect down towards the mouth of Tralee Bay, a view that suggests this was not simply a forgotten corner of a field but a deliberately placed shelter, perhaps for a person watching livestock on the hillslope, or finding brief cover from the Atlantic wind.

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Pete F
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