Hut site, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

Out on the bogland of Kealduff in south-west Kerry, a small rectangular outline barely breaks the surface of the ground.

What remains of this hut site is easy to miss: the lower courses of a stone wall, no more than forty centimetres high in places and a metre thick, protruding just enough above the bog to suggest that something deliberate once stood here. Moor-grass has done most of the work of concealment, leaving only a jumbled line of stone to trace the building's original footprint, roughly 4.8 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west.

The site sits on a slight rise in rough grazing land, positioned to overlook Lough Naparka to the south-west. That orientation may or may not have been incidental; small rectangular structures of this kind turn up across Kerry and the wider Irish uplands, sometimes associated with seasonal farming or transhumance, the practice of moving livestock to higher ground in summer, though nothing in what survives here points firmly to any particular period or use. The dimensions are modest even by the standards of vernacular building, suggesting a single-roomed structure unlikely to have housed more than a handful of people, or perhaps animals, at any one time. Recorded by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in 1996, it represents the kind of marginal, unspectacular archaeology that tends to be passed over in favour of more legible monuments, yet quietly accounts for much of how people actually lived and worked across this landscape.

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Pete F
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