Hut site, Killogrone, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Within a larger enclosure in Killogrone, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, there is a structure so reduced by time that it barely registers as a building at all.
What remains is an oblong scatter of collapsed stone, with only a short stretch of internal stone facing still discernible along its southern side. It was once a subcircular hut, the kind of small, rounded dwelling that appears across early medieval Ireland, typically built within or beside a ringfort or similar enclosure, and used for domestic or agricultural purposes. Here, the collapse is so thorough that the original form can only really be inferred rather than seen.
The hut sits in the western half of its parent enclosure, a relationship that hints at how such sites were typically organised, with ancillary structures clustered inside a defensive or boundary wall. The Iveragh Peninsula, a landscape dense with early historic and prehistoric remains, has yielded many such sites, and this one was recorded as part of a systematic archaeological survey of South Kerry published in 1996 by Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan through Cork University Press. Even within that catalogue of worn and fragmentary places, this site is noted as very poorly preserved, a description that is itself a kind of archaeological honesty about what survives and what does not.