Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

On the open mountain terrain above the valley of a tributary of the Feohanagh river on the Dingle Peninsula, there is a stone structure that has been quietly serving two purposes across a considerable gap in time.

What began as a circular hut foundation has been reworked, at some point, into a sheep-fold, its original form still legible beneath the modifications but no longer intact.

The foundation measures roughly 3.8 metres in diameter and survives to a height of about 1.5 metres, with walls approximately a metre thick. These proportions are consistent with the kind of early dry-stone dwelling found across the upland areas of the Corca Dhuibhne, the territory encompassing the Dingle Peninsula, where evidence of early settlement is unusually dense. The entrance faces north-west and opens into an adjoining sub-rectangular enclosure measuring around 4.1 by 4.7 metres internally, the addition that most clearly signals the structure's later agricultural life. At some stage, whoever was working these slopes found a ready-made stone shell and adapted it for keeping sheep, a practical reuse that has been repeated countless times across the Irish uplands and that, in doing so, has both preserved and obscured the original archaeology. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a thorough regional catalogue that recorded many such sites across this part of Kerry.

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Pete F
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