Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On a hillside in Erneen, in the south-west corner of County Kerry, a small oval outline in the ground marks where someone once built a home.

It is easy to miss. The walls have long since collapsed, leaving a low rubble scatter barely forty centimetres high, and the interior is so obscured by fallen stone that the original floor level is difficult to read. Yet the shape is still there, a space roughly five metres east to west and just over three metres north to south, which is to say not much larger than a modest modern bathroom.

What makes the structure quietly interesting is the care taken to make it habitable on sloping ground. Whoever built it did not simply place walls on the hillside and accept an uneven floor. Instead, the south-eastern portion of the interior was built up, raised about twenty centimetres, while the north-western side was cut thirty centimetres down into the slope itself, levelling the living space between the two. The walls were drystone construction, meaning no mortar, just carefully selected and stacked stones, and at around sixty-five centimetres thick they would have been solid enough to carry a roof of some kind. The hut does not sit in isolation. It falls within a larger enclosure and is associated with a field system nearby, suggesting this was not a temporary shelter but part of a small, organised agricultural landscape, the remnant of a community that farmed and lived here over an extended period.

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Pete F
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