Hut site, Killurly Commons, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killurly Commons, Co. Kerry

On the south-western slopes of Knocknadobar, a mountain on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, three small huts sit half-swallowed by vegetation.

Built without mortar, using the drystone technique of carefully stacked and interlocked stone, they have settled quietly into the hillside over what may be centuries, their outlines blurred by collapse and overgrowth but still legible to anyone who stops to look.

One of the structures is particularly distinctive in its construction. Formed of slabs arranged radially, like spokes spreading from a centre, and flanked on the outside by upright stones, it represents a building method that speaks to a careful, almost deliberate use of available material. Small in scale, around two metres in diameter and surviving to roughly sixty centimetres in height, it has suffered considerable collapse on its southern side. Whether these huts served as shelters for seasonal herders moving livestock to upland grazing, as booley huts, or had some other function is not recorded, but the hillside setting is consistent with transhumance practices that were common across Ireland into the early modern period. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented the site in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, which remains one of the most thorough records of this landscape's layered past.

The site sits on common land, and the terrain is typical of the rougher ground on Knocknadobar's lower slopes, meaning the huts are unlikely to announce themselves. They reward a slow approach and a willingness to read the ground carefully, since overgrown drystone ruins can easily be mistaken at first glance for natural field scatter.

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Pete F
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