Hut site, Tulaigh Fhialáin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of Collybeg, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, there is said to be a hut site.
Nobody has been able to find it. That combination, a place recorded because local people knew it was there, and subsequently swallowed by the landscape before anyone could confirm it, gives this particular entry an unusual quality among archaeological sites: it exists primarily as an absence.
The site was noted on the basis of local information, passed on by people familiar with the high ground above Tulaigh Fhialáin. Such knowledge, held in the memory of a community rather than in any document, is often the only trace that survives of small, unmonumental structures. Hut sites of this kind on the Kerry uplands are typically the remains of dry-stone or turf shelters associated with seasonal grazing, small-scale agriculture, or earlier settlement, though without a physical examination it is impossible to say anything more precise about what stood here or when. Before any survey team could properly record it, the area was absorbed into a commercial forestry plantation, and the site could not be located within it.