Hut site, Murorgán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Murorgán, Co. Kerry

In a patch of rough, rocky pastureland above Brandon Bay on the Dingle Peninsula, there is a small stone structure that has quietly outlasted almost everything built around it.

It is a corbelled drystone hut, meaning its walls curve inward as they rise, with each course of unmortered stone projecting slightly beyond the one below until the roof closes over, no cement or mortar involved at any stage. The result is something that looks almost organic, as though it grew from the ground rather than was placed upon it. What makes this particular example a little more intriguing than others in the region is the presence of a possible second chamber adjoining its north-north-east side, hinting that it may have been slightly more than a single-cell shelter.

The structure is modest in its dimensions: roughly 2.9 metres by 1.9 metres across, standing just 1.36 metres high, with walls about 1.4 metres thick. Those proportions tell you something about how it was built and what it was built for. The walls are as thick as the interior space is tall, the kind of ratio that keeps a structure standing through Atlantic winters without any need for mortar or dressed stone. The irregularity of its shape is typical of vernacular corbelled buildings on the Dingle Peninsula, where the builder worked with whatever the landscape provided rather than to any strict geometric plan. The site was recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage and published in 1986, a survey that documented the extraordinary density of early remains across this corner of County Kerry.

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