Hut site, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope above the Coomeelan stream valley in south-west Kerry, a small circular structure sits half-consumed by bog, its collapsed drystone walls still just visible above the peat.

The hut is modest in scale, roughly 2.6 metres in diameter, and what survives is little more than a low ring of tumbled stone, rising only about 20 centimetres above the surface. Yet the care taken in its original construction is still legible in the ground itself.

Whoever built this hut was working on a hillside, and they solved the problem of uneven ground with a practical tidiness that survives in the archaeology. The eastern portion of the interior was cut into the slope, while the western side was left raised, the two adjustments together producing a level floor within the circular wall. The wall itself, built without mortar in the drystone tradition, was around 65 centimetres thick where it stood. The best-preserved section runs from the south-east around to the south-west. Two further hut sites of the same type lie approximately ten metres to the south-east, suggesting this was not an isolated shelter but part of a small cluster of structures, possibly associated with seasonal grazing or upland farming activity of the kind once common across the hillsides of Kerry.

The site sits in rough hill pasture in the townland of Gearhanagoul, in a landscape where bog has slowly risen around and over the remnants of earlier occupation. The protruding wall fragments are easy to miss, low and worn as they are, and the surrounding terrain gives little away.

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Pete F
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