Hut site, Shronebirrane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Shronebirrane, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope of Knocknaveacal in County Kerry, a small D-shaped structure sits partly swallowed by bog, its stones grass-covered and its walls long since collapsed to their lower courses.

What survives is just enough to read: a roughly built drystone shell, measuring about 2.1 metres north to south, with a straight northern side running 3.2 metres east to west. Three upright stone slabs, each reaching no higher than 0.6 metres, remain in position along the wall line at the south, north, and east. The hut was cut roughly 0.8 metres into the hillside at the north, using the slope itself as a partial back wall, a practical technique that would have offered some shelter from weather rolling in off the Kerry hills. Rubble scattered downslope to the south suggests the front of the structure has spread and settled over time.

The site sits in rough hill pasture to the north of a tributary of the Drimminboy River, and it does not stand alone. It lies directly against the outer face of the northern wall of a nearby enclosure, the kind of enclosed farmstead or settlement boundary that appears widely across early medieval Ireland, where a circular or roughly oval earthen or stone wall defined a household's working space. Another hut site of similar character lies around 25 metres to the southwest, suggesting this part of the Knocknaveacal slope once supported a small cluster of activity rather than a single isolated shelter. Whether these structures were used as dwellings, seasonal bothies for people working upland grazing, or shelters connected with agricultural routines attached to the enclosure is not established, but the grouping points to deliberate, organised use of this hillside at some point in the past.

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Pete F
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