Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

On the eastern face of Beenmore, in boggy upland pasture above Coomnacronia Lake, a loose cluster of dry stone hut sites sits quietly in sheep-grazed ground.

What makes them particularly striking is not any single structure but the arrangement: four huts positioned so that each is visible from the others, two at around 350 metres elevation and two a further 34 metres downhill to the north-east. A further nine hut sites lie 500 metres to the north-east, down the slope from this group, suggesting that this stretch of the Kerry uplands once supported a degree of organised, seasonal habitation that the bare hillside no longer hints at.

The two huts at the core of this group, situated roughly 300 metres north of Coomnacronia Lake, are poorly preserved, their forms now defined mainly by a rough outline of boulders rather than standing walls. Dry stone construction, which uses no mortar, relies entirely on the careful fitting of stones, and what survives here gives only a faint outline of what once stood. The larger of the two is oval, measuring five metres on its north-west to south-east axis and two metres across, with walls surviving to about 0.6 metres in height and 0.75 metres in thickness. No entrance is visible. Immediately to its south-east is a second, smaller hut site with an internal diameter of around three metres. The function of such upland huts is generally associated with seasonal pastoral activity, the kind of transhumance practice in which people moved livestock to higher ground in summer, but the specific history of this site remains unrecorded.

The setting adds a layer of context that the ruins themselves cannot provide. From the north-east, there are views down the valley, past Curra Hill at 275 metres, towards Dingle Bay. Seefin Mountain lies to the east. The intervisibility of the four huts, and their position on the hillside with Drung Hill rising to the north, suggests these were not isolated shelters but part of a landscape that people once moved through and worked in a deliberate, patterned way.

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Pete F
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