Hut site, Lisbane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Lisbane, Co. Kerry

At Lisbane in County Kerry, two faint rings of stone sit quietly in the landscape, their outlines so indistinct that they might easily be mistaken for natural tumbles of rock.

Each describes a rough circle with an internal diameter of around 2.2 metres, just large enough to have sheltered a person or perhaps a small group from the Atlantic weather rolling in off the Iveragh Peninsula. What they represent, almost certainly, are the ghost-traces of ancient hut structures, the kind of simple stone-walled dwellings that once dotted the uplands and coastal margins of southwest Ireland.

The two possible huts occur in the southern half of the site and were recorded as part of a thorough archaeological survey of south Kerry carried out by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996. The Iveragh Peninsula, best known today for the Ring of Kerry road circuit, preserves an extraordinary density of early settlement evidence beneath its heathered slopes and boggy ground. Circular stone huts of this kind are broadly associated with early medieval or prehistoric pastoral activity, used by people managing livestock on seasonal grazing land, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a confident date to structures as lightly preserved as these. The poorly defined nature of the outlines suggests considerable age and exposure, the walls having long since collapsed or been robbed for other uses.

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