Hut site, Annagh More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Annagh More, Co. Kerry

On a rough hillside terrace in Annagh More, someone once took the trouble to cut into a slope and build up the lower side to create a level floor.

The result was a small oval structure, no more than two and a half metres from north to south and less than a metre and a half across, just large enough for a person or two to shelter, sleep, or work within. That careful levelling, compensating for the natural gradient by digging into the uphill side at the north and raising the southern interior slightly, suggests a builder who knew the land and intended the space to last.

What remains today are the lower courses of a drystone wall, a construction technique in which stones are stacked without mortar, relying entirely on weight and fit to hold their shape. The wall survives to roughly sixty centimetres in both thickness and height, and is clearest along its inner face from the south-east round to the west. The outer face has been obscured by collapse from the upper parts of the wall, and a loose scatter of stones to the south marks where much of that material has come to rest. The hut sits within a wider field system on the same terrace, which suggests it was not an isolated feature but part of a broader pattern of land use, possibly agricultural, possibly seasonal. Without excavation, a precise date is difficult to assign, but such small drystone oval structures appear across Kerry and the wider west of Ireland in contexts ranging from early medieval farming to post-medieval seasonal pasturing.

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Pete F
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