Hut site, Curragh More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Curragh More, Co. Kerry

On the western side of the Cummeenduff river valley in South Kerry, just below Curraghmore lake, a small circle of stones sits in the landscape doing very little to announce itself.

It is the remains of a circular hut, and its dimensions are modest almost to the point of anonymity: roughly 2.35 metres across, with walls surviving to only 35 centimetres in height and around 80 centimetres thick. That combination, a structure barely wide enough to lie down in, with walls that have slumped to ankle height, is typical of the kind of ephemeral shelters found across upland Kerry, the sort of place that sustained a person or a small group for a season rather than a lifetime.

The Iveragh Peninsula, of which this valley forms a part, is one of the more densely surveyed stretches of upland Ireland, and surveys of the area have recorded a considerable variety of such rough-built shelters alongside field systems, enclosures, and other traces of seasonal or marginal land use. Structures like this one were often associated with booleying, the practice of moving livestock to higher pastures during summer months, a pattern of transhumance that persisted in parts of Ireland well into the modern era. The rough construction noted here, without the careful coursing of drystone you might find in a more permanent building, is consistent with that kind of temporary occupation. Whether this particular hut dates to the early medieval period, the post-medieval centuries of booley activity, or somewhere in between, the available record does not say with precision.

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Pete F
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