Hut site, Killurly, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killurly, Co. Kerry

On the lower south-western slopes of Knocknadobar mountain in County Kerry, a collapsed ring of stones sits in a rocky field, easy to miss and difficult to date.

It is a hut site, roughly circular, measuring about 4.4 metres across and still standing to a height of around 1.2 metres in places. What makes it worth pausing over is the construction method: sections at the south-east and north retain visible coursing, and the stonework may originally have been corbelled. Corbelling is an ancient building technique in which successive layers of stone are laid so that each one projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually meeting at the top to form a self-supporting roof without the need for timber or mortar. That this survives at all, even in ruin, gives some sense of the ambition involved.

The Iveragh Peninsula, on which Knocknadobar sits, is one of the more archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland, its uplands and coastal margins scattered with the remains of early settlement, enclosures, and field systems. Structures of this kind, small dry-stone huts with corbelled or near-corbelled roofs, tend to be associated with early medieval or prehistoric occupation, though pinning down a precise date without excavation is rarely straightforward. The site was recorded as part of a systematic survey of South Kerry carried out by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued hundreds of monuments across this stretch of the south-west. The hut at Killurly appears as entry number 1336 in that survey, one point among many in a landscape that has been shaped and reshaped by human activity over millennia.

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Pete F
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