Hut site, Lisleibane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Lisleibane, Co. Kerry

Three circular stone foundations sit on the north-eastern slopes of Knockbrinnea in County Kerry, looking out across open ground with the Gaddagh river running along the western edge of the site below.

What makes the arrangement quietly arresting is its specificity: two of the huts are conjoined, sharing a common wall, while one of the pair retains the ghost of its own entrance passage facing north. A third hut stands independently, six metres to the north-west, as if keeping a considered distance from its neighbours.

The foundations are low but legible. The two paired huts measure roughly 4.1 metres and 2.5 metres in diameter, with surviving wall heights of around half a metre and just under a third of a metre, and wall thicknesses of 1.3 metres and 0.85 metres respectively. The third is slightly larger than the smaller of the pair, at 3.5 metres across, with walls still standing to about 0.7 metres and surviving to a thickness of 1.1 metres. These are the proportions of small, sturdy shelters rather than domestic dwellings in any elaborate sense. Circular stone huts of this kind are found across the uplands of the Iveragh Peninsula and are generally associated with seasonal or pastoral use, possibly connected with the movement of cattle to summer grazing grounds, a practice known in Ireland as booleying. The site is recorded in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which systematically documented the dense and often overlooked prehistoric and early historic landscape of South Kerry.

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