Hut site, Fehanagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Fehanagh, Co. Kerry

On the north-east slope of Knockowen Mountain in south-west Kerry, a small oval enclosure sits half-consumed by blanket bog.

The structure measures just 2.3 metres east to west and 1.7 metres north to south, its drystone walls, built without mortar by stacking carefully chosen stones, now reduced to a height of between 10 and 40 centimetres. The western wall has disappeared beneath the bog entirely, and what remains visible are only the protruding tops of the lowest course of stones, reading in the landscape less like a building than like a faint outline of one.

Small hut sites of this kind are found across the uplands of Kerry, often associated with seasonal pastoral activity, the keeping of cattle on summer hill pastures, or simply with the marginal, shifting patterns of rural settlement in early medieval and later periods. What gives this particular site its quiet interest is the company it keeps. A second hut site lies just 35 metres to the south-east, and relict field boundaries, the ghost outlines of former enclosures and land divisions, survive 18 metres to the north-west. Taken together, these fragments suggest not an isolated shelter but the remnant of a small, organised working landscape, people and their animals and their careful divisions of ground, all now folded under the same creeping peat that has, in its own way, preserved them.

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Pete F
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