Hut site, Rossacroo, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Rossacroo, Co. Kerry

On a north-west-facing slope in Rossacroo, County Kerry, the collapsed outline of a small rectangular hut sits almost swallowed by heather and rough hill pasture.

It is easy to miss, the walls reduced to a moss-covered ridge no more than thirty centimetres high, yet the builders clearly thought carefully about their surroundings. The north portion of the interior floor was raised by around thirty centimetres to level out the natural hillslope, a practical piece of engineering that speaks to habitual, considered use rather than a hasty or temporary shelter.

The structure measures roughly 5.2 metres east to west and 3.6 metres north to south, with a narrow entrance, just 0.65 metres wide, set into the north wall. The walls themselves were built in drystone, a technique requiring no mortar, the stones stacked and fitted against each other to hold by weight and friction alone. The whole thing is modest in scale, the kind of building that could have served as a seasonal shelter for a herder moving livestock onto upland grazing, a practice known in Ireland as booleying, where families or workers would spend the summer months in the hills with their cattle before returning to lower ground in autumn. Whether that interpretation fits here cannot be said with certainty from the physical remains alone, but the setting, rough hill pasture with long views north over the Sliabh Luachra uplands, is consistent with it. An enclosure of some kind lies approximately one hundred metres to the south, suggesting this hut was not an entirely isolated feature in the landscape but part of something slightly larger, perhaps a small agricultural complex whose fuller extent is now hard to read.

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Pete F
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