Hut site, Rossacoosane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Rossacoosane, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, at a place called Rossacoosane, two low shapes in the ground are all that remain of what were probably once small human dwellings.

They are easy to miss, and in a landscape already crowded with archaeological remains, that is perhaps not surprising. What makes them worth pausing over is precisely their modesty: the larger of the two measures just three metres across internally, the smaller barely 1.7 metres, and both stand to an average height of only about thirty centimetres above the present ground surface. These are not the bones of grand structures. They are the faint outline of ordinary life.

The two possible huts occupy the south-eastern sector of a wider site, though the sparse surviving fabric makes confident interpretation difficult. Archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented them as part of a comprehensive survey of South Kerry published by Cork University Press in 1996, a study that systematically worked through the dense and varied archaeological inheritance of the Iveragh Peninsula. The peninsula, which curves out into the Atlantic and is best known today for the Ring of Kerry, contains a remarkable concentration of early medieval and prehistoric sites, many of them small-scale enclosures, field systems, and structures that reflect centuries of marginal farming and pastoral activity. These hut footprints fit that pattern, even if their precise date and function remain uncertain.

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