Hut site, Glebe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In the townland of Glebe in south-west Kerry, a hut site survives as one of the quieter, more easily overlooked categories of early Irish settlement evidence.
These are the remnants of small, often circular or oval structures, usually marked today by little more than a low stony outline or a slight depression in the ground, the kind of feature that can vanish entirely beneath bracken or be mistaken for a natural hollow. They are associated broadly with early medieval pastoral life, when temporary or seasonal shelters were built on upland or marginal ground, though individual sites can be difficult to date precisely without excavation.
The site at Glebe is recorded in O'Sullivan and Sheehan's archaeological inventory of south-west Kerry, published in 1996, which catalogued the extraordinary density of field monuments across the Iveragh and Dingle peninsulas. That survey brought together hundreds of such modest sites alongside the more celebrated stone forts and ogham stones of the region, giving hut sites like this one a formal place in the archaeological record. The townland name Glebe, from the Latin gleba meaning a plot of church land, suggests a connection to ecclesiastical land-holding at some point in the area's history, though whether that has any bearing on the hut site itself is unclear.