Hut site, Glantrasna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-west-facing slope above the Glantrasna River in County Kerry, a low rectangular outline sits half-swallowed by rough hill pasture.
The stones that once formed its walls barely clear the sod, their tops protruding at irregular intervals like the spine of something long buried. It would be easy to walk past without registering what you were looking at.
The structure is modest even by the standards of early Irish hut sites: roughly 3.4 metres in its longer dimension, oriented north-east to south-west, and only 1.7 metres across. The wall survives to a height of about ten centimetres, its thickness running to around sixty centimetres, suggesting a solid construction that has simply been absorbed over centuries by the encroaching ground. One detail is quietly telling: the interior floor sits about twenty centimetres higher than the surrounding terrain, a characteristic sometimes seen where occupation deposits or deliberate levelling have raised the living surface above the slope. A second hut site lies just 34 metres to the east, which raises the possibility that this was never quite as solitary a place as it now appears, the two structures perhaps in use at the same time, by the same small community, in some arrangement we can no longer fully reconstruct.