Hut site, Ownagarry, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Ownagarry, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, a patch of ground holds what might easily be mistaken for natural undulation in the landscape: two low, sod-covered mounds sitting within an oval-shaped enclosure, the remains of circular huts that have been slowly surrendering to grass and time.

What makes them quietly arresting is their ambiguity. They may once have been conjoined, two structures sharing a wall or opening onto one another, though the ground itself no longer gives a definitive answer.

The northern hut is the better documented of the two. Its internal space measures roughly 3.4 metres by 1.8 metres, modest even by the standards of early medieval or prehistoric habitation, where circular stone huts, sometimes called clocháns, were built to shelter a single person or small family rather than a household in any modern sense. The wall footings survive to just 0.2 metres in height and spread about 1.35 metres wide, which suggests the walls were once considerably more substantial before the slow processes of collapse, weathering, and vegetation gradually reduced them to their present form. The oval enclosure surrounding the huts is a feature typical of early Irish settlement sites, where a defined boundary, whether of stone, earthwork, or both, marked out domestic or agricultural space from the wider landscape. The site was recorded as part of A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a systematic effort to catalogue the extraordinary concentration of early remains across this part of Kerry.

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