Hut site, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

On a slight rise above Lough Naparka, half-swallowed by the boggy floor of the Glenbeigh horseshoe, five rectangular stone huts sit within a network of field walls that the encroaching peat has been quietly burying for centuries.

The walls survive only two or three courses high, yet enough remains to read the settlement clearly: internal spaces ranging from roughly 3.5 by 1.7 metres up to 5.5 by 3 metres, with coursed drystone walls averaging a metre in width. What makes the complex particularly arresting is not just its scale but the addition of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of a type built throughout early medieval Ireland, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge.

The souterrain here is a drystone construction consisting of two passages set at right angles to each other, connected by a double-lintelled creepway, a low crawl-through opening roofed with flat stones. The east-west passage runs 2.7 metres in length, standing just under a metre high and slightly over a metre wide; the north-south passage is shorter at 2 metres, and a little narrower. The geometry is precise and deliberate, suggesting builders who understood the structural logic of underground construction in wet ground. Taken together with the huts and field walls, the site represents a small farming settlement of some complexity, its community organised around enclosures, domestic space, and concealed underground storage, all of it now partly submerged in the boggy pasture of one of Kerry's more remote glacial valleys.

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Pete F
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