Hut site, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry

On a steep southern slope of Ballysitteragh mountain on the Dingle Peninsula, two small circular huts once stood joined together, their walls built without mortar and their roofs corbelled inward, stone by stone, until the courses met at the top.

Corbelled construction, where each ring of stones projects slightly further inward than the one below to form a self-supporting dome, is one of the oldest and most demanding building techniques in the Irish tradition, and here it survives, even in ruins, as a recognisable pair of conjoined chambers. Each hut measures 3.3 metres in diameter, and the remaining walls stand to around 0.8 metres. What makes the northern hut particularly interesting is a small detail that would be easy to miss: a lintelled wall-cupboard, a niche formed by laying a flat stone across an opening in the wall, creating a built-in recess. That somebody thought to include such a feature in a structure of this scale suggests these were not temporary shelters but spaces used with some regularity and intention.

The huts sit on a shoulder of the slope surrounded by traces of old field boundaries, remnants of an agricultural landscape that once organised this hillside into parcels of worked land. Together, the huts and field systems suggest a self-contained upland settlement, likely associated with seasonal farming or pastoral activity, of a kind well documented across the Dingle Peninsula. The site is recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of Corca Dhuibhne, which catalogued the remarkable density of prehistoric and early medieval remains across this part of Kerry, a peninsula that preserves one of the highest concentrations of such monuments anywhere in Ireland.

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