Hut site, Releagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Releagh, Co. Kerry

Some archaeological sites vanish not through time alone but through the deliberate work of modern agriculture.

In a hollow at Releagh in south-west Kerry, set within the ghostly outlines of old field boundaries, there once sat a small circular hut site, modest in scale but carefully made. By 2007, it was gone entirely, the land reclaimed and reseeded, leaving no visible trace above ground.

When investigators first recorded the site in 2000, they found the remains of a roughly circular structure measuring approximately 2.5 metres north to south and 2.1 metres east to west, defined by a collapsed drystone wall, a type of construction using dry-laid stone with no mortar, around 0.6 metres thick and surviving to about 0.5 metres in height. Large stones from the lower courses still protruded through the surface of the shallow bog, though much was obscured by fallen rubble. Whoever built the hut had put some thought into its placement: the southern portion of the interior sat on slightly raised ground, while the northern side had been cut back into the slope to produce a level floor. It was a small but deliberate act of engineering, shaped around the contours of the hillside. The hut sat within a network of relict field boundaries, the kind of fossilised landscape that accumulates across centuries of successive farming, each generation leaving faint lines in the ground. By the time archaeologists returned in 2007, all of it had been absorbed back into a reseeded field.

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