Hut site, Killogrone, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the eastern bank of a river in Killogrone, somewhere on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, three small huts sit quietly within the remains of an old field system, now swallowed almost entirely by dense forestry.
What makes the grouping unusual is less any individual structure than the ensemble: domestic habitation, agricultural organisation, and what appears to be a cattle-pen arranged together on a slope and running right to the cliff-edge, as if whoever lived and worked here had claimed every usable metre of ground before the land simply ran out.
The site includes at least one hut whose foundations survive in recognisable form, built to a roughly rectangular plan and measuring just 1.9 metres by 0.9 metres internally, scarcely larger than a generous cupboard. Along the inner wall-face, a basal row of upright stones was set in place, a simple but deliberate technique for stabilising the wall base from within. Nearby, an oval enclosure approximately 6.5 metres in diameter perches on the cliff-edge; its shape and position suggest it functioned as a cattle-pen, keeping livestock contained at the furthest boundary of the workable land. The field system surrounding the huts implies sustained occupation and agricultural effort rather than temporary shelter, though precisely when people lived and worked here is not recorded. The cluster was documented as part of the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which brought together an extraordinary density of sites from one of Ireland's most archaeologically layered landscapes.