Hut site, Scarteen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Scarteen, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slopes of Knockleama in south-west Kerry, a low ring of stone sits on a natural terrace amid rough hill grazing, almost indistinguishable at first glance from the tumbled field walls around it.

It is only when you walk the perimeter that the geometry becomes clear: a circular hut site roughly six metres across, its defining wall still standing to about sixty centimetres in places, though partially collapsed and reduced largely to its lower courses. The interior is level, scattered with loose stones that have fallen or been displaced over time.

What makes the site quietly interesting is not the structure in isolation but its relationship to the landscape around it. The hut sits within a field system, and one of those field boundaries runs close to the south-eastern arc of the structure, suggesting the two were part of the same organised use of this hillside at some point in the past. Circular stone hut sites of this kind are a recurring feature of the Irish upland landscape, built by communities who worked marginal land, kept livestock on the higher ground, or used the slopes seasonally. The wall construction here, roughly seventy-five centimetres thick, is consistent with that vernacular tradition of dry-stone building, where mass and weight substituted for mortar. Without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date, but such hut sites are commonly associated with prehistoric or early medieval activity, periods when the upper slopes of Kerry hills were more intensively used than they are today.

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Pete F
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