Hut site, Maulagowna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a north-west-facing slope in the rough hill pasture above the valley of Lough Inchiquin, a small rectangle of collapsed stone is easy to walk past without registering what it once was.
Measuring just 2.6 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, this was a hut, a single modest shelter whose drystone walls, built without mortar, have long since folded inward, leaving a low spread of rubble around 0.6 metres thick and still standing, in places, to roughly 0.9 metres. Loose stones lie scattered across the interior, and to the west the structure abuts a north-south field wall, suggesting it once sat within a small system of managed ground rather than entirely isolated on open hillside.
Drystone hut sites of this kind appear across upland Kerry in considerable numbers, though pinning them to a specific period is rarely straightforward without excavation. Some belong to early medieval pastoral farming, when people moved livestock to higher ground in summer; others are later, associated with the intensive use of marginal land during the centuries before the Great Famine, when population pressure pushed cultivation and settlement further up the slopes than would otherwise have made sense. The position here, immediately north of a river and overlooking the Lough Inchiquin valley, would have offered a water source close at hand and a reasonable view of the surrounding terrain, which was likely as practical a consideration as any when the walls were first raised.