Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slopes of Barrerneen, in rough hill pasture above the townland of Erneen, a small D-shaped outline barely rises from the ground.

The remains measure just three metres north to south, defined by a drystone wall, the kind built without mortar by stacking and fitting stones together, that is now largely grass-covered and survives to a height of only about twenty centimetres. The wall is best preserved along its east-west run, and a straight northern side, roughly two and a half metres long, gives the structure its flat-backed shape. An entrance opens at the north-east.

What makes the site quietly compelling is not the hut alone but the small cluster of which it forms part. A second hut site adjoins it to the north-west, and a relict field boundary, the faint trace of an old enclosure or land division that has long since fallen out of use, survives in the immediate vicinity. Together these fragments suggest a moment of settled or seasonal occupation on this hillside, people who built in stone, divided land, and sheltered here before the pasture slowly reclaimed everything. Hut sites of this kind are found across Kerry's uplands and can date to any number of periods, from the early medieval centuries onward, though without excavation it is rarely possible to be more precise. The landscape they sit in, rough grazing on an exposed south-facing slope, is itself part of the record, an environment that was once worked and is now only grazed.

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Pete F
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