Hut site, Gearha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gearha, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a shallow depression in the ground is doing a quiet but respectable job of concealing its past.

It measures roughly 3.6 metres north to south and 2.9 metres east to west, sinking to a maximum depth of 1.4 metres, and to the untrained eye it reads as little more than a boggy hollow. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, however, recorded something more definite here: a rectangular structure, centrally positioned within a surrounding enclosure. That structure is now gone, reduced to this subrectangular scoop in the earth, scattered with rubbish.

What makes the site more than a simple ruin is a small opening near its southern edge, measuring roughly half a metre wide, thirty centimetres tall, and seventy centimetres deep. This may be the entrance to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically used for storage or occasional refuge. Souterrains are found across the country but are particularly numerous in Munster, and their presence is often the best surviving indicator that a site was once a functioning homestead rather than a field boundary or enclosure of more ambiguous purpose. The pairing of a surface structure with a potential souterrain places this modest depression within a recognisable tradition of early Irish rural habitation, even if almost nothing of that habitation now remains above ground.

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Pete F
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