Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On a north-facing slope in south-west Kerry, tucked into a sheltered hollow above a river valley, the collapsed remains of a small D-shaped hut sit in rough hill pasture as quietly as anything could sit anywhere.

It measures just 2.5 metres along its longest axis, defined by a drystone wall, built without mortar by fitting stones together, that has long since fallen in on itself, leaving a low, spread run of rubble roughly 0.6 metres high and 0.6 metres thick. The straightest surviving stretch runs along the north-west side for 3.8 metres, and it is here that the structure is best preserved, with two larger boulders incorporated directly into the fabric of the wall. A break in the south-west may once have served as an entrance.

What makes this small ruin quietly interesting is less the hut itself than what it sits beside. An enclosure adjoins it directly to the north-west, and a relict field boundary, the ghostly trace of a former agricultural division of the land, runs up to this same cluster of features and stops. That termination suggests the boundary was contemporary with, or at least organised around, the hut and enclosure rather than laid out independently of them. Taken together, the three elements, hut, enclosure, and field boundary, read as the remnant of a small farming arrangement, perhaps a seasonal shelter for a herder watching animals on the upland, or an outlying piece of a more extensive settlement pattern lower in the valley. Without excavation, dating is uncertain; such drystone hut sites in Kerry range across a very long period of use.

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Pete F
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