Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

In a landscape already busy with ancient enclosures and field boundaries, a small oval hollow in the ground at Erneen, in south-west Kerry, marks where somebody once built themselves a shelter.

It is easy to overlook, which is partly what makes it worth paying attention to.

What survives is the lower portion of a drystone wall, that is, a wall built from stone without mortar, relying entirely on the careful selection and placement of each piece. The hut it defined was oval in plan, measuring roughly 2.2 metres from east to west and 1.3 metres from north to south, making it a compact structure by any measure. The wall, about 0.55 metres thick and still standing to around 0.8 metres in height at its best-preserved stretch, is described as well-constructed, a detail worth dwelling on. Someone took care here. The site sits within a broader enclosure and an associated field system, suggesting this was not an isolated structure but part of a working agricultural landscape, the kind of small-scale rural organisation that once covered much of upland Ireland before it was gradually abandoned or obscured.

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Pete F
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