Hut site, Killurly Commons, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killurly Commons, Co. Kerry

Three of the huts at this site on the Iveragh Peninsula occupy what is, by any measure, an unusual position: they sit on an island in a stream, tucked into a bowl-shaped recess on the north-western slopes of Knocknadobar, above Coonanna Harbour.

A fourth hut stands slightly apart, a little higher up the mountain slope. The choice of an island, however small, as a building platform is the kind of detail that stops you. It suggests deliberate thinking about water, perhaps for drainage, perhaps for some degree of separation, perhaps for reasons we can no longer recover.

The structures themselves are modest in scale. One subrectangular hut, partly rebuilt at some point, measures roughly 2.3 metres by 1.5 metres. Immediately to its west, the foundations of what may be a conjoined hut survive in poor condition, heavily overgrown, and of similar dimensions. One large upright stone remains incorporated into the western wall. Subrectangular huts of this type are found elsewhere on the Iveragh Peninsula and tend to be associated with seasonal or temporary occupation, the kind of shelter used during summer grazing on upland pasture, a practice known in Ireland as booleying. Whether that is what happened here is not certain, but the mountain setting and the modest dimensions are consistent with it. The site was recorded in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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