Hut site, Inchincoosh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Inchincoosh, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope in Inchincoosh, in the rough hill pasture of south-west Kerry, a circle of collapsed drystone barely two metres across sits quietly beneath a dense mat of ferns.

It is easy to miss, and easier still to dismiss as a natural tumble of stone. But the arrangement is deliberate: the remains of a circular hut site, its wall once standing to some height, now reduced to a low spread of rubble roughly sixty centimetres thick and forty centimetres tall, with loose stones scattered both inside and out.

Drystone hut sites of this kind are found across upland Ireland, often associated with transhumance, the seasonal movement of livestock to higher ground during summer months, a practice known in Irish as buailteachas. Herders would construct or reuse simple shelters on the hills, staying close to their animals during the grazing season before returning to lower ground in autumn. The Inchincoosh example is modest even by those standards, with an interior so small it would have offered shelter for one or two people at most. What gives the site a little more weight is its company: a second hut site lies approximately twelve metres to the north, suggesting this was not an isolated refuge but part of a small cluster of activity on the hillside, perhaps used by the same community across the same seasonal rhythms.

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Pete F
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