Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

On the southern side of Com Amhais, in a very wet and rocky field in north Kerry's Gleannta Thuaidh, there sits a low circular ruin that most walkers would step around without a second glance.

It is a corbelled drystone foundation, roughly three metres across and surviving to about a metre in height, with walls between one and one and a half metres thick. Corbelled construction, in which each course of stone projects slightly inward over the one below to create a self-supporting dome or vault without mortar, is an ancient technique found at various points across the Dingle Peninsula, and the sheer mass of walling here relative to the structure's interior diameter gives some sense of how solid, and how deliberately built, even a modest hut of this kind was meant to be.

The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark survey that catalogued hundreds of monuments across one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland. Com Amhais lies within that broader terrain where early medieval and prehistoric remains have a habit of appearing in unlikely corners, tucked into hillsides or half-swallowed by bog. The precise date of this particular structure is not recorded, but corbelled drystone huts of this form are generally associated with early Christian or early medieval use, sometimes connected with transhumance, the seasonal movement of livestock to upland pastures, or with the kinds of solitary occupation that once left faint marks across the Irish countryside.

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