Hut site, Tuar An Chladáin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Tuar An Chladáin, Co. Kerry

On a terraced ledge above the Owroe river valley, tucked into the south-facing mountain slope between Coomacarrea and Meenteog in south Kerry, eight ancient huts sit largely forgotten.

Most have collapsed to little more than a course or two of stone, their diameters ranging from two to six metres, spreading across roughly forty metres of ground. One, however, has survived in a form that makes the cluster genuinely unusual: a corbelled drystone hut, just 2.4 metres across and 1.4 metres high, its walls nearly a metre thick, with a small entrance passage opening to the north-east. Corbelled construction, where flat stones are laid in overlapping rings that gradually close to form a roof without any mortar, is an ancient and labour-intensive technique found at a number of Kerry sites, but what sets this place apart is what lies directly beside it.

Immediately to the north-east of the hut's entrance is the opening to a triple-roomed semi-subterranean chamber, also built in corbelled drystone and roofed with lintels. The three chambers extend in different directions, west, north, and east, and each averages around 2.2 metres long, a metre high, and a metre wide. Small, dim, and partly sunk into the ground, these interconnected spaces are locally known as Uaigh an Duine, which translates roughly as the Person's Grave, and also as Clochán na gCaorach, the Sheepfold of the Sheep, a name recorded by B. Ó Cíobháin. That dual naming is itself suggestive: the same structure held in local memory simultaneously as a burial place and a shelter for animals, a pairing that reflects the layers of use, and imagination, that accumulate around old stones over centuries. Whether the chambers were ever a grave, a refuge, a store, or simply a place that attracted stories, is not recorded.

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