Hut site, Garranebane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Garranebane, Co. Kerry

On the western slopes of Bentee, a modest hill on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a small circular structure sits in boggy pasture beside a stream, so slight in its presence that it could easily be mistaken for a natural irregularity in the ground.

It is just 2.2 metres in diameter, barely large enough to shelter a single person, and its ruined walls incorporate an existing rock outcrop into the southern side, suggesting that whoever built it worked with what the landscape already offered rather than imposing anything upon it.

A reclining upright stone at the north-east may mark what was once the entrance, a detail that gives the structure a faint legibility even in its collapsed state. Hut sites of this kind are relatively common across the upland and coastal areas of Kerry and the wider west of Ireland, and they are notoriously difficult to date without excavation. They tend to be associated with seasonal or temporary occupation, whether by herders moving livestock to summer pasture, a practice known as booleying, or by individuals living at the margins of settled land for reasons practical or ascetic. The Iveragh Peninsula, surveyed comprehensively by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan in the 1990s, contains a considerable number of such structures, many of which remain unstudied beyond their initial recording.

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