Hut site, Meenogahane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Meenogahane, Co. Kerry

On the Ordnance Survey maps, a small feature in Meenogahane, north County Kerry, carries the quietly evocative name Lisheen-cankeragh, translated as "little fort of the sheep's head".

Immediately to its south-west, and easily overlooked, sits a stone hut site of uncertain age, semi-circular in plan and barely forty centimetres high at its tallest surviving point. It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. That restraint is part of what makes it worth attention.

The structure measures 3.7 metres north to south and retains a small opening of roughly two metres facing south, the orientation most commonly favoured in early Irish vernacular building for shelter from prevailing winds and exposure to whatever warmth the light offered. Its relationship to the adjacent Lisheen-cankeragh, a lisheen being a diminutive enclosure of the kind often associated with pastoral or seasonal use, remains unclear, though the possibility that the two features functioned together has been noted. A promontory in the vicinity may also be relevant to understanding the broader landscape context. Beyond that, the record is spare. No date has been firmly assigned, no excavation appears to have taken place, and the site sits quietly in the farmland of north Kerry, noted in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey of 1995 but otherwise little discussed.

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Pete F
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