Hut site, Killoe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the south-eastern slopes of Bentee, on the Iveragh Peninsula, two small stone huts sit joined together in the rough pasture, their foundations overgrown but legible.
What makes them worth pausing over is the construction method: corbelled drystone, meaning the walls were built without mortar, with each successive course of stone angled slightly inward until the structure closed overhead into a beehive dome. This technique, ancient and demanding, produced shelters that could last centuries, and these two have outlasted whatever purpose they once served.
The pair are known locally as a cloghaun or clochán, the Irish term for this type of beehive hut. They sit on a slight rise in rough pasture, roughly twenty metres south-west of a caher, a type of stone ringfort enclosed by a dry-built wall, which suggests this small cluster was once part of a larger pattern of early settlement in the area. The southern hut measures approximately five metres by four metres internally and has its own entrance, just over a metre wide, facing east. A single upright stone in its northern wall marks where a communicating passage once connected it to the northern hut, which measures around four point eight metres by three point seven metres. A basal row of thin slabs lines the inner face of the walls, a detail that hints at care in the original construction. The site was surveyed and recorded by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan as part of their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996.