Hut site, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a low mound of grass-covered rubble sits in the landscape with little to announce its age or purpose.
What lies beneath the sod is the collapsed footprint of a small rectangular hut, its walls still present in outline though largely undone by time and vegetation, and its interior divided by a cross-wall that can only be partially traced through the debris. At roughly 3.6 metres long and 1.6 metres wide, with surviving wall remnants reaching just under a metre in height, this is not a grand structure by any measure. A small rectangular annex, barely more than half a metre across, projects from the eastern side, suggesting the building once served a purpose organised enough to require a secondary space.
The measurements alone tell a particular story. Hut sites of this kind, small single-roomed or subdivided rectangular structures, appear throughout the upland and coastal fringes of south Kerry, and are associated with a range of periods and uses, from early medieval pastoral activity to post-medieval seasonal occupation by those grazing livestock on mountain pasture. The internal cross-wall here hints at some functional division, perhaps separating a sleeping area from a working or storage space, though the degree of collapse makes any confident interpretation difficult. The site at Teeromoyle was recorded as part of A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a systematic effort to document the remarkable density of field monuments across this part of Kerry.