Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Letter, Co. Kerry

Two small circular stone huts sit on boggy upland pasture on the east face of Beenmore, in the hills above Coomnacronia Lake in County Kerry.

They are poorly preserved, defined by little more than a rough outline of boulders, and neither hut shows any sign of an entrance or a communicating passage between them. The larger of the two has an internal diameter of just three metres, with walls surviving to a height of half a metre; the smaller, conjoined to it at the south-east, measures two metres across internally. These are not the dimensions of permanent dwellings. They are the kind of seasonal shelters associated with transhumance, the old practice of moving livestock to upland grazing in summer months, a way of life that left its traces across the Irish landscape in the form of booley huts and temporary enclosures.

What makes this particular site quietly remarkable is the density of similar remains in the surrounding terrain. These two conjoined huts form part of a cluster of four intervisible hut sites on the hillside, two at an elevation of around 350 metres and two others roughly 34 metres lower to the north-east. A further nine hut sites lie approximately 500 metres downhill to the north-east, suggesting that this whole stretch of mountainside was, at some point, a busy place during the grazing season. The reach of the site extends beyond the structures themselves. To the south, an early field wall runs uphill in a westerly direction, partly swallowed by the encroaching bog. Parallel to it, and directly upslope from the huts, a band of stony ground about six metres wide climbs the hillside before terminating at the next ridge, a ghostly remnant of activity whose precise function is unclear.

The site sits 2.07 kilometres uphill from the road and 300 metres north of Coomnacronia Lake, on the east face of Beenmore with Drung Hill to the north. From the north-east, the ground opens to views down the valley and across the range of hills, with Curra Hill at 275 metres, out to Dingle Bay, and eastward to Seefin Mountain. The huts themselves are easy to miss; what the landscape offers instead is a sense of the scale and organisation of upland life that once extended across these now largely empty slopes.

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Pete F
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