Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of Barrerneen in County Kerry, a small oval hollow in the rough hill pasture is easy to walk past without registering what it is.
The lower courses of a collapsed drystone wall protrude just above the surface of the bog, tracing an outline roughly 2.8 metres from north to south and 1.8 metres from east to west. That is about the footprint of a large garden shed, and yet it represents someone's deliberate attempt to make a habitable space on an awkward hillside.
Whoever built this structure went to considerable trouble to level the interior against the slope. The floor was raised slightly at the southern end and cut into the upslope at the northern end, each adjustment around 0.2 metres, modest in scale but carefully considered. The walls, built in the drystone technique of stacking stones without mortar, have long since collapsed to a thickness of about 0.6 metres and a surviving height of only 0.2 metres, leaving just enough to read the building's original shape. The site sits within a network of relict field boundaries, the kind of ghost landscape that records earlier phases of agricultural use before the bog crept over them. Two further hut sites lie close by, one approximately 6 metres to the west, another around 70 metres to the north-east, suggesting this was not an isolated shelter but part of a small cluster of occupation, perhaps seasonal, perhaps associated with the management of upland grazing.