Hut site, Rinn Chonaill, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the eastern slopes of Reenconnell, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, an irregular enclosure defined by old field walls contains what appears to be a small cluster of ancient dwellings.
The enclosure measures roughly 33 by 38 metres and holds four structures, three of which are thought to be hut sites and one possibly a sheep-pen. What makes the grouping quietly interesting is not its grandeur but its domesticity: this looks like the remains of a working settlement, modest in scale, pressed into a hillside.
The best-preserved of the three probable huts sits in the north-west corner of the enclosure. It is a circular drystone structure, built without mortar in the traditional method of laying stones so they support one another through weight and careful placement, with a diameter ranging between roughly five and just under six metres, and surviving walls reaching about a metre in height. In the eastern side of that wall, a hollow has been identified that appears to be partly lintelled and stone-lined, suggesting either a wall-passage or a small internal chamber. Such features appear in other early Irish stone structures and were used variously for storage or as a kind of architectural recess. Alongside it, a second smaller subcircular foundation survives to about 0.8 metres, with a diameter of around 3.7 metres. A third structure, placed directly inside the eastern wall of the enclosure, consists of a circular area approximately 3.87 metres across, now marked mainly by a low bank of collapsed stone between 0.2 and 0.3 metres high. These details were first recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a meticulous regional study that brought dozens of such sites into the scholarly record.