Hut site, Killelan, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killelan, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Killelan, overlooking Valentia Harbour, a pair of conjoined stone huts sit half-buried in the hillside, their walls still holding a rough geometry despite centuries of collapse and encroaching vegetation.

What makes the site quietly arresting is the construction technique: corbelled drystone, a method in which courses of unmortared stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing to form a roof without the need for timber or mortar. The huts occupy a stone-revetted terrace, a levelled platform cut and faced with stone to create a workable surface on sloping ground, and they sit among the remnants of old field fences, suggesting that this stretch of mountain was once a good deal more organised and inhabited than it appears today.

The two conjoined huts are connected by a lintelled passage less than a metre wide. The larger of the pair, roughly circular in plan, measures about 4.6 by 4.5 metres internally, and its original entrance is difficult to identify with certainty because of the accumulated fill of stone collapse. The passage leads west into a smaller, subcircular hut measuring around 5.8 by 3.6 metres internally, though rubble now blocks the far end. Directly against the outer eastern face of the larger hut, a rectangular structure was added at some point, probably later in date; it survives as a low, overgrown stony bank with an entrance to the south, and a sheepfold was built against its southern side, pointing to continuing use of the site for pastoral activity long after the original huts fell out of use. The relationship between the three structures, each generation of occupation leaning into the last, is part of what gives the site its particular character.

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Pete F
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