Hut site, Knocknagowan, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Knocknagowan, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope at Knocknagowan in County Kerry, a small rectangle of collapsed stone sits in heather-clad pasture among rocky outcrops.

It is easy to miss, and that is partly what makes it interesting. The remains measure just two metres east to west and 1.6 metres north to south, the walls reduced to a low, tumbled course of drystone roughly half a metre high and sixty centimetres thick. Whoever built it was working with the land rather than against it: the eastern portion of the floor was cut into the hillside to a depth of about twenty centimetres, while the western end was left raised by roughly thirty centimetres, the two adjustments together levelling out the interior on what would otherwise have been an awkward slope. Loose stones scattered across the floor are all that remain of whatever the interior once held.

Drystone construction, in which stones are fitted together without mortar, was common across many periods of Irish history, and small hut sites of this kind can be associated with anything from early medieval settlement to much later seasonal use, such as the practice of booleying, in which people and livestock moved to upland pastures during the summer months. The precise date of this particular structure is not recorded, and the site offers few diagnostic features to help narrow it down. What it does show clearly is a practical, considered response to difficult terrain. The builder understood the slope, adjusted for it with modest but deliberate earthworks, and raised a small shelter that has outlasted almost every trace of the person who used it.

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Pete F
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