Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

On the boggy pastureland of Na Gleannta Thuaidh in north Kerry, a small circular stone structure sits quietly in the landscape, its original purpose long since repurposed by the practical demands of farming life.

The building is a corbelled drystone hut, a form of construction in which successive courses of flat stones are laid so that each slightly overhangs the one below, eventually closing into a roof without the need for mortar or timber. Somebody, at some point, decided it made a perfectly serviceable sheep-fold, which is either an indignity or a kind of continuity, depending on how you look at it.

The structure is modest in scale: roughly three metres in diameter, standing about 1.2 metres high, with walls approximately 1.4 metres thick. Those proportions tell their own story; the walls are nearly as wide as the interior space is tall, which is typical of corbelled buildings designed to carry their own considerable weight. About 150 metres to the northwest sits another recorded site, and directly to the south are the barely legible remains of a second circular structure, slightly larger at around four metres across but reduced to just 0.2 metres in height, more earthwork now than architecture. The two together suggest this corner of the Dingle Peninsula was once a more deliberately occupied place. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the peninsula, a detailed regional survey that catalogued the extraordinary density of early remains across this part of County Kerry.

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Pete F
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