Hut site, Kealduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower north-east-facing slopes of Coomreagh Mountain in south-west Kerry, a small circle of collapsed stone sits in rough grazing land, easy to overlook and easier still to walk past.
What remains is a roughly circular hut site, measuring just 3.4 metres north to south and 2.9 metres east to west, its drystone walls partially fallen outward so that the rubble now lies strewn around the perimeter like a slow exhalation. The entrance, on the eastern side, is just 0.75 metres wide and survives in damaged form, its north edge defined by a single slab measuring 1.1 metres in length.
The wall itself tells a layered story. The lower courses are built from large boulder-type stones, while the upper courses shift to smaller material, and portions of these upper sections show clear signs of rebuilding at some point after the original construction. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful fitting of stone against stone, is a technique with a very long history in Kerry and across the west of Ireland, appearing in structures from the prehistoric period through to early medieval times and beyond. The interior wall height of 1.2 metres gives a sense of how enclosed, and how low, the space once was. What makes this particular site quietly companionable rather than solitary is that the east-facing entrance looks directly toward another hut site of the same type, located roughly 2 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting that whoever used these structures did not do so alone.