Hut site, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

On a south-west-facing slope above the valley of the Sheen River in County Kerry, the peat has been slowly swallowing a small oval structure for centuries.

What breaks the surface now are the basal stones of a collapsed drystone wall, the outline of a hut measuring roughly 2.8 metres along its longer axis, with an entrance just half a metre wide facing east. It is an easy thing to walk past, reading it as nothing more than a scatter of field stone. Looked at with some patience, though, the oval shape asserts itself, and the deliberateness of its construction becomes legible in the rough pasture.

The structure is not alone. Three further hut sites of similar character sit within sixty metres of this one, arranged loosely to the north-west, south-west, and west-south-west. Relict field boundaries and two associated field systems survive in the immediate vicinity, suggesting that what is preserved here is not an isolated building but a fragment of a wider agricultural landscape, a cluster of small shelters set among the managed ground that once sustained them. Drystone construction of this kind, using unmortared stone built up without any binding material, was common across upland Ireland for millennia, and the peat that has buried the lower courses of the wall has, in a quiet way, also protected them.

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Pete F
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