Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

Somebody went to considerable trouble to make a small, level floor on a hillside in Erneen.

The remains of a D-shaped hut sit on a west-facing slope in rough heather pasture, overlooking a river valley, and the effort involved in its construction is still legible in the ground. Because the slope would otherwise have made the interior unusable, the builders raised the western portion of the floor and cut into the upslope on the eastern side, each adjustment compensating for the other so that the finished surface sat level. The resulting structure measured roughly 1.8 metres east to west, defined by a low earth and stone bank. It is modest in every dimension, but the engineering logic behind it is quietly deliberate.

What makes the site more than an isolated curiosity is its context. Along its straight western side, the hut adjoins a wall belonging to a network of relict field boundaries, the ghost of a former agricultural landscape that once organised this hillside into working units. A second hut site lies approximately fifteen metres to the south, suggesting that this was not a solitary shelter but part of something more organised, perhaps a small cluster of seasonal or permanent occupation connected to the fields around it. Relict field systems of this kind are found across upland Kerry, representing phases of land use that were later abandoned as populations shifted or land fell out of cultivation. The heather that now covers the slope is itself a consequence of that abandonment, gradually reclaiming ground that was once cleared and managed.

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Pete F
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