Hut site, An Baile Uachtarach Theas, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In Ballyoughteragh village on the Dingle Peninsula, roughly ten metres from a modern dwelling house, a small circular stone building stores turf.
That alone would not be remarkable, but the structure doing this everyday work is a corbelled hut, built without mortar using a technique in which each successive ring of stones projects slightly inward over the one below, gradually closing the circle until a single capstone seals the roof. The result is a self-supporting dome of dry stone, and this one closes at a height of nearly three metres above the floor.
The building was recorded and described in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne area, the broader territory of the Dingle Peninsula, which catalogued structures ranging from prehistoric monuments to vernacular buildings of uncertain age. This hut is thought to be fairly recent in origin rather than ancient, which makes it an interesting case: a traditional building method, one associated on this peninsula with early medieval monastic beehive cells and field shelters, reproduced at some later point using the same logic and the same local materials. Inside, the walls rise vertically for about seventy centimetres before a projecting course of stone forms a narrow ledge, above which the corbelling begins in earnest. Two niches are set into the wall directly opposite each other at just over a metre from the floor, the kind of detail that suggests the space was designed for human use. The east-facing doorway, framed with a lintel, is wide enough to enter crouching and tall enough, at just over a metre and a half, to stand near upright. The interior diameter runs between roughly three and four metres.
What is quietly interesting about this structure is the continuity it represents, not in any grand cultural sense, but in a purely practical one. The corbelled form has been used on this peninsula for well over a thousand years because the local stone lends itself to it and because the technique works. Here, someone applied it again, for the straightforward purpose of keeping turf dry, and the building is still doing that job.