Hut site, Rossard, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Rossard, Co. Kerry

At the foot of a west-facing cliff in the rough hill pasture of Rossard, south-west Kerry, a low ring of drystone walling marks the outline of a circular hut that has been quietly dissolving into the landscape for centuries.

The structure is modest in scale, measuring roughly 3.6 metres east to west and 3.4 metres north to south, with walls that still stand to around 0.7 metres in height and reach nearly a metre in thickness at their base. Drystone construction, which uses carefully selected and stacked stone without mortar, relies entirely on the weight and fit of its components, and when the upper courses collapse inward, as they have done here, the interior fills with rubble and vegetation. Fern growth now obscures what lies within, and loose stone is scattered along the outer perimeter where the wall face has shed material over time.

The setting itself is particular. The hut sits immediately south-east of Cummeenadillure Lough, tucked against a cliff that would have offered some shelter from prevailing weather. A second hut site lies immediately to the north, suggesting that whoever occupied this spot did not do so alone. Whether these structures represent seasonal shelters used by people moving livestock through upland pasture, or something older and more permanent, the notes do not specify, and the archaeology of such sites in Kerry resists easy dating without excavation. The tradition of building small circular or oval stone shelters in the Irish uplands spans a very long period, from early medieval farming communities to the booley huts used by transhumant herders in more recent centuries, and the two at Rossard have not yet been firmly placed within that range.

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Pete F
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