Hut site, Lohart, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a north-facing slope in Lohart, County Kerry, two ancient hut sites share a wall.
That detail, easy to miss in a landscape of collapsed stone and rough pasture, quietly implies something about the people who built here: these were not isolated shelters thrown up in a hurry, but structures arranged in deliberate relation to one another.
The site that survives is modest in scale, a rectangular footprint measuring roughly 4.4 metres east to west and 2.6 metres north to south. Drystone walling, a technique using stones fitted together without mortar, still defines the southern and northern edges, though it has largely collapsed to a height of around 1.25 metres with a thickness of about 0.7 metres. The eastern boundary is formed not by built wall at all but by a natural rock scarp, suggesting the builders incorporated the existing terrain into their design. To the west, the structure shares its wall with a neighbouring hut, and loose stones scattered across the interior are likely the remains of whatever once stood higher. The slope itself is sheltered from the south by rock, which would have offered some relief from the prevailing weather in what is otherwise an exposed part of south-west Kerry.
No date has been firmly attached to the site, and without excavation it is difficult to say whether these huts belonged to an early medieval farming settlement, a seasonal booley site used during summer grazing, or something else entirely. What can be said is that the double structure, two huts sharing a common wall on a carefully chosen slope, points to a degree of planning and perhaps communal use that tends to get lost when such places are described simply as ruins in a field.