Hut site, Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, Co. Kerry

Out on Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, a small island off the Kerry coast grazed today only by a resident herd of deer, an oval depression in the open grassland marks the outline of an ancient hut site.

What makes it quietly odd is the absence of any visible entrance. The low bank that defines the structure, sod-covered, roughly 0.3 metres high and averaging 1.5 metres wide, encloses an oval space measuring 5.5 metres north to south and 9 metres east to west. Stones show through in places on both the inner and outer faces, suggesting something more deliberate than a natural rise in the ground, but whoever once came and went here left no obvious threshold.

The site sits at the centre of the island on a wide expanse of short grass, with unobstructed views in every direction. It is not alone in the landscape: a bank and ditch lies roughly 120 metres to the northwest, and a further site sits approximately 60 metres to the north. Together they suggest that this island, now left to deer and open sky, was once arranged and inhabited in ways that are only partially legible from what survives at ground level. A rocky bluff rises to the southeast, which means the hut site itself cannot be seen from that quarter, giving it a degree of natural concealment from at least one direction, even if no formal entrance was ever identified.

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Pete F
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