Hut site, Shronebirrane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At Shronebirrane in south-west Kerry, a small circle of ancient stonework protrudes from the bog, its lower courses still more or less in place after what may be many centuries of slow submergence.
The structure is modest in scale, just three metres across, but the way it was built into the hillside tells you something about the people who put it there. The northern side of the interior was cut roughly thirty centimetres down into the rising slope, while the southern side was built up to compensate, creating a level floor from an uneven gradient. It is a practical solution so obvious in retrospect that it barely registers as ingenuity, yet it is exactly that kind of detail that makes the site worth pausing over.
The hut sits within a larger enclosure, positioned in its south-eastern sector, and it was not a solitary dwelling. A second hut site of the same general type lies just ten metres to the west, suggesting at least a small cluster of occupation rather than a lone structure. The walls are drystone, meaning no mortar, just carefully chosen and stacked slabs, some of which are set upright in the lower course. The bog has crept up around them over time, partly burying and partly preserving what remains, so that the grass-covered slabs now emerge from the ground like the rim of something half-forgotten. Circular drystone hut sites of this kind are found across the uplands of Kerry and the wider Irish landscape, often associated with early medieval settlement or seasonal pastoral use, though pinning a precise date to any one example without excavation is rarely straightforward.