Hut site, Na Leadhba Liatha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Na Leadhba Liatha, Co. Kerry

Two upright stones rising less than half a metre from a south Kerry field are not, at first glance, much to look at.

But those paired uprights, set roughly 80 centimetres apart and flanked by a short curved run of stony bank, are almost certainly the last coherent remnants of a prehistoric hut site, a structure that once formed a complete circle of stone before centuries of farming, and more recently a neighbouring house, steadily encroached upon it.

The site sits at the head of the Ballinskelligs river valley, in the townland of Na Leadhba Liatha, on gently sloping pasture that faces south-east. It was recorded as early as 1902 by a researcher named Lynch, who described it then as an ill-defined circle of stones containing much debris, suggesting it was already well along the road to disappearance. What Lynch saw has since been further reduced by ploughing from the north-west and by construction from the north-east, leaving only those two opposed uprights and the curved bank that curves away from each of them. Roughly 50 metres to the north-north-west, another hut site once stood, though that one has been levelled entirely. The pairing is a reminder that these places were rarely isolated; they tended to cluster, suggesting organised, settled use of a landscape over a long period.

The curved bank extending from the uprights is the key detail worth considering. In its arc, however fragmentary, it preserves the geometry of the original structure, and the fact that the two uprights face each other across that 80-centimetre gap points strongly to a former entrance. Hut sites of this kind, typically circular stone-walled enclosures used as dwellings or shelters in prehistory, survive across Kerry in varying states of completeness, but few have been so comprehensively reduced to their bare minimum of legible elements.

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