Hut site, An Gabhlán Thoir, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Gabhlán Thoir, Co. Kerry

At An Gabhlán Thoir in Co. Kerry, a low ring of grass-covered foundations sits quietly at the centre of an ancient enclosure, easy to overlook and easy to misread as a natural feature of the ground.

What it actually represents is the ghost of a circular dwelling, just 6.5 metres in diameter, preserved inside a univallate rath, which is the most common form of Irish ringfort: a roughly circular enclosure defined by a single earthen bank and ditch, typically associated with early medieval farming settlement. The rath itself sits on level waste ground at the eastern side of a road, and a second rath lies roughly 150 metres to the south.

The circular hut foundations occupy the centre of the enclosure, and a scatter of earthfast boulders near the western edge of the interior may indicate the position of a second, smaller structure. The phrasing "may mark" matters here; the boulders are suggestive rather than conclusive, which is a common condition in this kind of field archaeology. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage as part of the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark regional study that catalogued hundreds of monuments across one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland.

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