Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope in south-west Kerry, among heather and rough hill pasture, the collapsed outline of a small stone structure sits within a landscape that has largely forgotten it was ever managed at all.

The hut is modest in every dimension, measuring roughly 2.7 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, its walls now reduced to a low tumble of drystone, that is, stone laid without mortar, surviving to about half a metre in height on the western, northern, and part of the eastern sides. Two boulders anchor the southern end, and between them a narrow entrance, just 0.5 metres wide, still opens to the south-east. The interior is buried under rubble.

What makes this more than a solitary ruin is its context. The hut sits along a curvilinear stretch of walling belonging to a wider network of relict field boundaries, the ghostly remnants of an agricultural system long since abandoned. It lies roughly 90 metres west of the eastern terminal of that wall system, and another hut site of similar character sits approximately 35 metres to the south. Together they suggest not random occupation but something more organised, people working and perhaps sheltering within a parcelled-out landscape, on a hillside that now looks entirely unworked. Relict field systems of this kind are found across upland Ireland and can date from the Bronze Age through to post-medieval times, though without excavation the age of the Erneen site remains uncertain. The river valley visible below would have offered water and perhaps better ground for tillage, while the slope itself may have served as summer grazing land, a pattern of land use with deep roots in Irish rural life.

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Pete F
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