Hut site, Inis Tuaisceart, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Inis Tuaisceart, Co. Kerry

On Inis Tuaisceart, the northernmost of the Blasket Islands, two small stone huts survive within an Early Christian enclosure so compact and so precisely engineered that a person of average height could not stand upright inside either one.

One hut measures just 1.85 by 1.08 metres internally, roofed with flat stone flags no more than 65 centimetres above the floor; its entrance is barely 47 centimetres wide. The second, slightly roomier structure, built against the inner face of the enclosure's north wall, rises to just over a metre and has an entrance at its south-west corner measuring 35 centimetres across, narrow enough to require a deliberate sideways squeeze. These are not ruins in the usual sense; they are spaces that were always this small, built to a logic that was never about physical comfort.

The island lies four miles off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula and two and a half miles north of the Great Blasket, bounded entirely by sea-cliffs and rising to 573 feet at its highest point along the north-west side. Of its 241 acres, the northern half carries no trace of human settlement at all. Everything of archaeological interest concentrates in the south, within a small field system that contains the Early Christian monastic settlement associated with St Brendan. Drystone construction, in which stones are laid without mortar and rely entirely on their own weight and fit for stability, was the standard building method in early Irish monasticism, and the enclosures here follow that tradition. The huts themselves are built partly within the thickness of the enclosure wall or directly against its inner face, making the boundary wall and the living space structurally inseparable. The site was surveyed and described by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne.

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