Hut site, Ballynahow More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Ballynahow More, Co. Kerry

On the steep southern slopes of Knocknadobar, in rocky terrain above the Iveragh peninsula, a small stone structure has been absorbing the Kerry weather for longer than anyone can say with certainty.

It is corbelled, meaning its circular walls were built inward course by course until the stones met overhead without the use of mortar or timber, a technique found in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical and domestic buildings alike. At roughly five and a quarter metres across and still standing to nearly two metres in height in places, it is a reasonably substantial example of the type, though the walls to the south and west have long since collapsed into low mounds of rubble.

The hut was not always used for a single purpose. A cross wall divides the interior, and the northern section was at some point adapted as a sheepfold, the kind of practical reuse that obscures original function and date in equal measure. Two annexes extend to the west and northwest, and it is the northwestern one that attracted particular attention. In 1939, an investigator named O'Connell, working for the Office of Public Works, interpreted a low lintelled passage connecting the annex to the main hut as a small souterrain. Souterrains are underground or semi-underground stone-lined passages found widely in early medieval Ireland, typically associated with settlement sites and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. The annex itself has an internal diameter of three and a half metres. The eastern entrance to the main structure is lintelled but now blocked.

The site sits in genuinely rough ground, high on a slope that offers little shelter and presumably little incentive for later building over it, which may partly explain its survival. The collapsed sections aside, enough remains standing to give a clear sense of the original form.

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Pete F
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