Hut site, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the south-western slopes of Teeromoyle in County Kerry, a small stone structure sits in rocky, boggy pasture doing its second job.
It began as something older and more deliberate, and ended up as a sheepfold. That quiet demotion is, in its own way, a complete piece of social history.
The structure is a corbelled hut, circular in plan, built from drystone without mortar. Corbelling is one of the oldest building techniques known in Ireland: stones are layered so that each course projects slightly inward over the one below, gradually closing the space until a roof of sorts is formed without the need for timber or any spanning material. This one is modest in scale, measuring around 3.1 metres in diameter and standing only 0.8 metres high, with walls approximately 1.5 metres thick. Those thick walls relative to the interior diameter are characteristic of corbelled construction, where much of the mass is structural. At some point after it was built, the hut was modified to serve as a sheepfold, a common fate for older field structures on the Iveragh Peninsula, where later farming generations made practical use of whatever was already standing. The site is documented in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the extraordinary density of such monuments across south Kerry.