Hut site, Uragh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a north-east-facing slope above Lough Inchiquin in south-west Kerry, a small oval hollow in the rough hill pasture marks what was once a human dwelling.
It is easy to walk past without registering what you are seeing: a low ring of grass-covered stones, barely protruding above the surrounding bog, enclosing a space roughly 2.8 metres from north to south and 2.2 metres from east to west. That is a floor area closer to a large wardrobe than a modern room, yet someone levelled it carefully into the hillside, cutting the south-west portion some 0.4 metres into the upslope and leaving the eastern interior correspondingly raised, so that the usable surface would sit roughly flat rather than tilting with the gradient.
The structure is a drystone hut site, built without mortar by stacking and fitting stones, a method used across Ireland from prehistory through the early medieval period and beyond in upland and marginal settings. The collapsed wall, now around 0.6 metres thick where it can still be traced, would originally have formed the base of a low rounded structure, possibly topped with timber, turf, or thatch. What is particularly suggestive about this site is its position within a wider landscape of use. An enclosure of a type typically associated with agricultural or domestic activity lies just 10 metres to the north, hinting that this was not an isolated shelter but part of a small, organised occupation of the hillside. Rough hill pasture of this kind was often worked seasonally, with people and animals moving up from lower ground during summer months, a practice known in Ireland as booleying.
The site sits in a landscape that rewards careful looking. The stones of the wall are grass-covered and unobtrusive at ground level, so the oval outline is best appreciated by moving slowly and watching for the slight change in texture and height where the bog surface lifts around the perimeter. Lough Inchiquin lies below, and the north-east aspect of the slope means the site would have caught morning light while remaining sheltered from the prevailing south-westerly weather, a small but telling detail about whoever chose this particular patch of ground.