Hut site, Maulagowna, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Maulagowna, Co. Kerry

At Maulagowna in County Kerry, a small dry-stone structure sits so close to the ground that a person standing beside it might easily mistake it for a natural feature of the hillside.

The walls, partially swallowed by grass, rise to just one metre at their tallest on the interior, and the single entrance, facing north-east, is only sixty centimetres wide, meaning anyone entering would have had to crouch or squeeze through sideways. It is the kind of structure that asks immediate questions about who built it, and why, and what it felt like to shelter inside.

The hut itself is modest in every dimension. Its overall footprint runs 4.4 metres north to south and 2.6 metres across, with an internal living space of roughly 2.8 metres by 1.45 metres, not much larger than a generous wardrobe laid flat. The walls, built without mortar in the dry-stone technique common across upland Ireland for millennia, average half a metre in thickness, which accounts for a good portion of the overall width. One detail in particular gives the structure a sense of deliberate, practical intelligence: the north-west corner is built directly against a natural outcrop of bedrock, meaning the builder used the living rock as both a foundation and a ready-made wall, saving labour and gaining solidity at once. Structures like this appear across the Kerry uplands in various forms, from the booley huts used by transhumant herders who moved cattle to summer pastures, to the shelters of those working turf or tending remote land, though attributing this particular example to any one tradition or period is difficult without further investigation.

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Pete F
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