Hut site, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Glashanaglaragh stream in Gortlahard, a small circle of collapsed stone sits in rough hill pasture, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.

What it represents, though, is a fragment of a working landscape: a hut site, roughly circular in plan and measuring just 3.2 metres east to west and 2.8 metres north to south, its drystone walls now reduced to a low, tumbled ring no more than 0.4 metres high. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful fitting of stones, was the dominant building technique across upland Ireland for millennia, and structures like this one could date from anywhere between the early medieval period and the nineteenth century.

What gives the site a degree of coherence, despite its modest scale, is its relationship to the features immediately around it. A relict field boundary, one of those ghostly lines of stone that once divided worked ground from open hillside, abuts the hut to the west. An enclosure lies just one metre to the north-west. The entrance break in the western wall, a gap of 0.8 metres, aligns naturally with this broader arrangement, suggesting that the hut was not a solitary shelter but part of a small cluster of structures, perhaps a seasonal farming settlement of the kind once common across the uplands of south-west Kerry. The north-western arc of wall is the best preserved section, giving some sense of how the building would originally have read in the landscape.

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Pete F
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