Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing rocky slope in Erneen, County Kerry, a small D-shaped hut site sits half-swallowed by bog, its collapsed drystone wall still just visible above the surface.

What makes it quietly arresting is how the structure was built: rather than constructing all four sides from scratch, whoever made this shelter used a natural vertical face of outcropping rock to form the western wall, saving labour and anchoring the whole thing into the hillside. The result is a D-shape roughly 3.4 metres across at its widest east-west span, with the constructed drystone element running around the curved side and the rock face completing the enclosure to the west.

Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful fitting of stones, was common across Kerry for centuries and into the early modern period. The walls here, though now collapsed to around 0.6 metres in height and about the same in thickness, would once have defined a small but functional interior. That interior is today obscured by rubble, and the whole structure occupies rough hill pasture above a river valley, suggesting it served someone working the land or grazing animals on the higher ground rather than living at any great remove from settled life below. The bog has crept up around it over time, which is both what threatens to conceal it and what has helped preserve what remains.

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Pete F
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