Hut site, Scarteen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Scarteen, Co. Kerry

At Scarteen in south-west Kerry, a small oval outline in the ground marks what was once a roofed structure, now reduced to its lowest courses of drystone walling.

The hut measures just four metres east to west and three metres north to south, making it a modest space by any reckoning, and the walls that remain stand no higher than thirty centimetres. Rushes have colonised the interior, the kind of opportunistic vegetation that tends to move in once drainage is disturbed, and loose rubble lies scattered around the outside of the perimeter.

This is not a site that announces itself. It sits within a larger enclosure, which in turn forms part of a field system, so what survives here is one small component of a wider organised landscape. Drystone construction of this kind, walls built without mortar by carefully selecting and stacking flat stones, was common across early and medieval Ireland and required considerable skill to raise structures that could resist Atlantic weather. A short stone wall, slightly thinner than the hut walls themselves, runs westward from the structure to meet the enclosure boundary, suggesting a deliberate connection between the building and its surrounding field arrangement rather than two separate phases of activity placed near each other by coincidence. The overall picture is of a small agricultural settlement, probably a single dwelling associated with the management of the surrounding land, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date to what remains.

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Pete F
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