Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

On the eastern face of Beenmore in County Kerry, at around 350 metres above sea level, two small circular stone huts sit joined together in boggy upland pasture, their walls now barely half a metre high and their entrances entirely lost to time.

What makes them quietly remarkable is not their individual scale, which is modest by any measure, but their context: they are part of a cluster of four intervisible hut sites on this hillside, with a further nine more sitting 500 metres to the north-east downhill. That is thirteen recorded hut sites within a relatively compact area of mountain terrain, all of it now given over to sheep grazing.

The two conjoined huts described here, situated roughly 300 metres north of Coomnacronia Lake, are constructed in drystone, a technique using carefully placed stones without mortar, and defined now by little more than a rough outline of boulders. The larger of the two has an internal diameter of 3 metres; the smaller measures 2 metres across with walls 0.75 metres thick. No entrance survives, and no communicating passage between the two structures is evident. To the south, an early field wall runs uphill in a westerly direction, partly swallowed by the encroaching bog, and parallel to it, directly upslope, a band of stony ground roughly 6 metres wide climbs the hillside and stops short of the next ridge. That stony band may represent the ghost of an old pathway or field boundary, though the bog has done its work of obscuring whatever arrangement once existed here. From this elevation, on a clear day, the views extend north-east down the valley past Curra Hill towards Dingle Bay, and east towards Seefin Mountain, a reminder that these sites, however reduced, occupy a landscape that has been read and used by people for a very long time.

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Pete F
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