House - indeterminate date, Gualainn, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
On the lower southern slopes of Croaghskearda, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is itself the interesting part.
What was once a defined enclosure with three rectangular buildings inside it has been reduced to a level patch of ground in an otherwise sloping field, the kind of subtle flattening that most walkers would pass without a second glance. The site's Irish name, Fothrach na nAlbanach, meaning something close to "ruins of the Scots" or "ruins of the Albanians", adds a further layer of quiet strangeness, suggesting a memory, however distorted by time, of people from elsewhere.
When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map was made, the site was recorded as a univallate enclosure, meaning a roughly circular area defined by a single surrounding bank or wall. Three rectangular structures sat on the northern side of the interior, arranged parallel to one another in an east-west row and apparently built right up against the inner face of that enclosing boundary. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs described them at that point as ruins already nearly level to the ground, and each measured roughly ten metres in length. The classification of the site as a house of indeterminate date reflects genuine uncertainty; without excavation, it is impossible to say when the buildings were constructed or who used them. The details were examined and compiled as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, a systematic effort to document the extraordinary density of ancient remains across the Dingle Peninsula.