Hut site, Farran, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In the townland of Farran in County Kerry, the landscape holds a small but telling mark of earlier occupation: a hut site, the kind of low circular or sub-rectangular earthwork that survives from early medieval or prehistoric settlement, where the remains of a dwelling have outlasted the people who built it by many centuries.
These features are easy to miss. Without the right angle of winter light or a familiarity with the subtle rises and hollows of old ground, a hut site can look like nothing more than a slight irregularity in a field.
Hut sites of this kind are found across Kerry in considerable numbers, often the traces of small farming settlements dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, though some are older still. They are closely related to other settlement forms of the period, including raths, the circular earthen enclosures that once surrounded farmsteads, and booley sites associated with seasonal transhumance, the practice of moving livestock to upland grazing in summer. Kerry's varied terrain, from low coastal ground to the high ridges of the Iveragh and Dingle peninsulas, preserves a remarkable density of such features, many of them still unexcavated and understood only in outline.
The specific details of this particular site, its date, its form, any finds or associations that might tell a more complete story, are not currently available in the public record. It exists, for now, as a name on a map and a shape in a field, which is itself a kind of historical fact worth noting.
