Hut site, Uragh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Uragh, Co. Kerry

In the bogland of Uragh in south-west Kerry, a ring of collapsed drystone walling pushes just above the surface of the peat, marking the outline of a dwelling so small it would barely contain a modern bathroom.

The circular hut measures roughly 2.2 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, its walls reduced to a spread of tumbled stone roughly 0.7 metres thick. What makes the site quietly compelling is the evidence of practical adaptation built into its original construction: the south-western portion of the interior was cut some 0.4 metres into the hillslope, effectively levelling the floor against the natural incline, while the northern portion sits slightly raised at about 0.1 metres. Someone, at some point, thought carefully about how to make this small space habitable on an awkward slope.

The hut sits against the inner face of the south-eastern arc of a larger enclosure, the kind of arrangement that suggests it was not a freestanding structure but part of a more organised use of the landscape. A second hut site lies immediately to the south-west, indicating that whatever activity took place here involved more than one such building. Drystone construction of this kind, using unmortared stacked stone, was common across many periods of Irish prehistory and the early medieval era, and without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date. The bog that now partly conceals the site has, in a sense, preserved it, holding the collapsed walls in place while the surrounding landscape changed around them.

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Pete F
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