Hut site, Killogrone, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killogrone, Co. Kerry

Deep in the forestry on the east bank of a river in Killogrone, a small cluster of collapsed huts sits within the remains of an old field system, largely swallowed by trees.

There are three structures in total, each modest to the point of near-invisibility: a rectangular hut of rough construction measuring roughly three by two metres, a tiny circular structure barely a metre across that may have served as an animal shelter, and a second roughly rectangular foundation whose inner wall-face is lined with a basal row of upright stones. On the cliff-edge nearby, an oval enclosure about six and a half metres in diameter may once have functioned as a cattle-pen. What survives is fragmentary, the field walls having mostly fallen, leaving only scattered uprights in the undergrowth.

The site acquired an extra layer of complexity when a researcher named Henry, writing in 1957, recorded a cairn, two dolmens, and a standing stone at this location. When surveyors working from A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, came to verify these features, none could be identified. There are some shapeless mounds in the forest, but the more intriguing possibility is that one of the collapsed field-wall uprights was simply mistaken for a standing stone. It is a reasonable confusion: a lone upright poking from overgrown ground can read as something deliberate and ancient even when it is merely the last remnant of a mundane boundary. Whether Henry's dolmens and cairn suffered a similar fate, or whether they lie somewhere beneath the forest floor still unlocated, remains an open question.

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Pete F
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