Hut site, Tuairín Uí Dhuinnín, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a level terrace cut into the north-eastern slopes of Eagles Hill in County Kerry, a rough semicircle of upright stone slabs sits in boggy pasture, quietly marking the outline of a structure that once sheltered someone from the Atlantic weather.
The slabs are intermittent rather than continuous, block-like and set on end, forming a double outline roughly 3.5 metres across and about 0.9 metres thick. That modest diameter suggests a small, single-roomed hut, the kind of temporary or seasonal shelter that would have been unremarkable in its own time and is now easy to walk past without registering what it is.
The Iveragh Peninsula, of which this is a small corner, is extraordinarily dense with archaeological remains, ranging from Bronze Age standing stones to early medieval enclosures, and the upland slopes in particular preserve traces of activity that lower, more intensively farmed land has long since swallowed. This hut sits alongside an old field wall and some more recent enclosures, which suggests the terrace was used across more than one period, with later pastoral activity layering itself over whatever came before. The presence of the earlier field boundary raises the possibility that the hut formed part of a small agricultural or pastoral landscape, perhaps associated with seasonal grazing of the higher ground, though the available evidence does not allow a firm date to be pinned to it.