Hut site, Kimego, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Kimego, Co. Kerry

On the southern slope of a ridge above Valencia Harbour, in a patch of boggy pasture at the foot of a rock outcrop, a series of stone uprights mark a structure that nobody has quite been able to categorise with certainty.

The most conspicuous feature is an entrance passage facing south-south-east, formed by eight uprights in total, five on the west side and three on the east. Each upright averages roughly a metre in height, sixty centimetres wide, and fifteen centimetres thick, giving the passage a solid, deliberate character that speaks to careful construction rather than casual arrangement.

The site is recorded tentatively as a hut, the kind of early stone dwelling found across the Iveragh Peninsula, but the possibility that it was once a caher complicates that reading. A caher is a stone ringfort, typically a circular or oval enclosure with thick dry-stone walls, used during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead. Whether this structure belongs to that tradition or to something earlier and more domestic is difficult to say, partly because furze has colonised the ground so thickly that additional uprights may lie concealed beneath it. To the west, a further line of uprights may represent the remains of an old field wall, which would suggest the site once sat within a worked agricultural landscape rather than existing in isolation. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented it in their 1996 archaeological survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press, but the uncertainty in that description has never been resolved.

The dense furze growth noted in the survey is worth bearing in mind for anyone approaching the site. Much of the structure's extent may only become clearer in late winter or early spring, when vegetation is at its lowest and the uprights are easier to trace across the boggy ground.

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Pete F
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