Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the northern slopes of Com an Lochaigh, within the ghostly outlines of an ancient field system, a small circular stone foundation sits almost unnoticed in the landscape.
It is barely two metres across and just over a metre high, with walls roughly a metre thick; the kind of structure that registers as a slight rise in the ground rather than anything immediately legible as human-made. Yet those proportions, a diameter of 2.1 metres, a height of 1.1 metres, walls 1 metre thick, suggest something deliberate, a hut foundation that once sheltered someone on this exposed Kerry hillside.
The site sits within a broader old field system, the low banks and boundaries of which are still traceable across the slope. Field systems of this kind on the Dingle Peninsula are often of considerable antiquity, some dating back to the Bronze Age or earlier, though assigning a precise date to any individual element within them is rarely straightforward. The hut foundation itself was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark regional study that catalogued hundreds of sites across this densely layered landscape. The Irish name of the townland, Baile an Lochaigh, points to a lake or hollow, and Com an Lochaigh, the corrie or mountain hollow to which the slopes belong, reinforces a sense of a sheltered, bowl-like terrain shaped as much by glacial geography as by human settlement.