Hut site, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a semicircular arrangement of stones marks what remains of an ancient hut, its double row of upright stones still enclosing a sod-covered wall.

The structure is modest in scale, just 3.9 metres in diameter with walls roughly half a metre thick, but one upright on the eastern side stands nearly a metre tall, conspicuous enough to catch the eye even in rough pasture. That eastern prominence is a small puzzle in itself; whether it served a structural purpose, marked an entrance, or simply survived better than its neighbours is not recorded.

The Iveragh Peninsula, home to the Ring of Kerry, has an unusually dense concentration of early settlement remains, and hut sites of this kind are broadly associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date to any individual example. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented this particular structure as part of their comprehensive archaeological survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a project that systematically recorded the scattered field monuments of a landscape that had, in many cases, preserved them well precisely because it remained sparsely developed. The double-row construction technique, two lines of uprights with fill between them forming the wall thickness, is a known variant in vernacular building of the period, practical and durable when the materials to hand were stone and sod rather than dressed masonry.

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