Hut site, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

On the lower northern slopes of Beenduff, at the head of the Carhan river valley in south Kerry, a small cluster of ruined huts sits within an extensive field system that has largely returned to boggy pasture.

What makes the site quietly arresting is not any single structure but the coherence of the whole: four rectangular huts arranged around a large circular enclosure, connected by a formal trackway, and threaded through by old field walls that suggest a working landscape once organised with some deliberate logic.

The circular enclosure at the centre of the complex measures roughly 10 metres by 8 metres and is roughly built, with a basal row of intermittent upright stones along its inner wall-face. Its interior is now filled with stone collapse, but it appears to have been divided internally, which has led to the suggestion that it functioned as an animal pen. Drystone construction, in which stones are laid without mortar and rely on their own weight and careful arrangement to hold, is common across the Irish uplands and tends to be difficult to date without excavation. The four huts are all rectangular, ranging from a relatively substantial structure of 5.5 metres by 2.2 metres directly north of the enclosure, still standing to about a metre in height, down to a modest foundation just 2.7 metres by 1.65 metres further to the south. A 3-metre-wide trackway, its edges defined by upright slabs and boulders, runs east to west along the northern side of the complex, with many of the old field walls feeding directly into it. The overall impression is of a self-contained upland settlement, perhaps seasonal, organised around the management of animals and the movement of people and livestock along a defined route through the valley.

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Pete F
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