Hut site, Reenkilla, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Reenkilla, Co. Kerry

In the rough pasture of Reenkilla, a small rectangular space was once made habitable by a combination of human effort and convenient geology.

The builders of this hut, whoever they were, looked at a wooded hollow flanked by ridges of outcropping rock and saw the bones of a shelter already in place. The rock faces to the east and south, one of them rising to a vertical height of 1.7 metres, formed ready-made walls. Lower outcrops closed off the north side. Only the western end required a constructed wall, built in drystone fashion, that is, stone laid without mortar, relying on careful fitting and weight for its stability.

The structure measures roughly 5.1 metres east to west and 2.8 metres north to south, a compact interior even by the standards of early vernacular building. Drystone walling was also laid along the tops of the surrounding rock ridges, suggesting the builders were raising the overall enclosure height beyond what nature alone provided. Today the western wall, the one piece of genuine construction, survives to about 0.6 metres in both thickness and height, softened now under a covering of moss and grass. The interior is uneven and scattered with rubble, and the whole site is largely swallowed by trees and bushes. Without the rock faces to anchor the eye, it would be easy to walk past without registering that a deliberate structure is there at all.

The site sits in south-west Kerry, a part of the country where the landscape is dense with the physical traces of earlier occupation, many of them similarly inconspicuous. No date has been firmly established for this particular hut, and the absence of excavation means its function, whether seasonal shelter, a small farmstead outbuilding, or something else entirely, remains an open question. What survives is essentially a room that was half-built and half-found, tucked into the rock in a way that makes the boundary between construction and landscape genuinely difficult to draw.

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Pete F
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