Hut site, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

What looks, at a glance, like a slight thickening in the hillside grass is, on closer inspection, the outline of a life once lived.

On a south-facing slope above the valley of the Coomeelan stream in Gearhanagoul, a small circular hut site survives in rough hill pasture, its drystone walls collapsed and partly swallowed by the bog. The structure is modest by any measure, just 2.4 metres in diameter, the kind of space that would have held a single person, a small fire, and not much else.

The engineering involved, while simple, repays attention. Whoever built the hut had to contend with the slope of the hill, so they cut into the upslope on the north side to a depth of about 0.2 metres, and raised the south portion of the floor by roughly the same amount. The result was a level interior, a practical solution worked out in earth and stone on an unremarkable Kerry hillside. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful placement of stones, leaves no organic material to date, so the age of the structure is uncertain. The lower courses of the wall still protrude above the bog surface, the upper courses having long since collapsed inward. A second hut site lies just one metre to the south, suggesting this was not an isolated refuge but part of a small cluster of shelters, possibly used seasonally by people moving livestock to upland pasture, a practice known in Ireland as booleying.

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Pete F
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