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, a cluster of small stone structures sits quietly beneath the vegetation, easy to miss and easier still to misread.

There are three huts in total, or more precisely three groupings, built using drystone construction, a technique in which stones are laid and fitted together without mortar, relying entirely on their own weight and arrangement for stability. The walls are low now, worn down to less than a metre in most places, and the southernmost structure has collapsed considerably along its southern side. What survives is enough to make out the original forms: circular or near-circular plans, with slabs and upright stones arranged radially, like spokes spreading outward from a centre.

Two of the groupings are pairs of conjoined huts, meaning two circular cells sharing a wall or built directly against one another. The first pair measures roughly two metres in internal diameter each, with walls still standing to around eighty centimetres and nearly a metre thick. A second pair, positioned to the north-west and slightly larger at around 2.9 metres across, follows a similar construction method. A short distance to the south-west, a single hut of comparable design, its slabs set radially and reinforced on the outside by upright stones, completes the group. The details come from the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, one of the more thorough regional surveys undertaken in Ireland during that period. Who built these huts, and when, is not recorded; they may have served as shelters for transhumance, the seasonal movement of people and livestock to upland grazing, a practice once common across Kerry and long since abandoned on most hillsides.

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