Hut site, Shronebirrane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Somebody once levelled a floor on a Kerry hillside with considerable care and ingenuity.
On the slope at Shronebirrane in south-west Kerry, a small oval structure, roughly five metres east to west and four metres north to south, was built so that its interior would sit perfectly flat. To achieve this, the builders cut into the uphill ground to the north and built up the southern side with horizontally set stone slabs. The result, after who knows how many centuries of weathering, is a floor that remains level to this day.
The structure sits within a larger enclosure, occupying its south-eastern sector, and its outline is defined by a combination of methods: an earthen scarp along the south-west arc, upright slabs along the west, a single substantial boulder standing over a metre high at the north-north-west, and a stone-faced scarp following the northern curve. A gap on the eastern side may indicate where an entrance once stood. Hut sites of this kind, built from local stone and shaped into the contours of the land rather than against them, appear throughout Kerry and the wider south-west, often associated with enclosed farmsteads of early medieval date, though precise dating at any individual site is difficult without excavation. A second hut site of the same general type lies just 38 metres to the south-east, suggesting this was not an isolated dwelling but part of a small settlement or working complex on the hillside.