Hut site, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, on the Dingle Peninsula, two small stone huts have been absorbed so thoroughly into a field boundary that a casual walker might mistake them for nothing more than a thickening in the wall.

They are known as Clochán na gCat, and the fact that they continue to function, in a loose sense, as part of the working landscape of the land around them makes them quietly remarkable. Their survival owes something to that very incorporation; folded into the field wall, they were never entirely dismantled.

The two huts are circular and conjoined, built using drystone corbelled construction, a technique in which stone courses are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, gradually closing the roof without mortar or timber. The result is a beehive-shaped cell, sturdy enough to have lasted centuries on an exposed Atlantic hillside. The two structures differ slightly in scale: one has an internal diameter of approximately 3.15 metres and stands to around a metre in height, while the other measures roughly 3.6 metres across and rises to about 1.85 metres. Clocháin of this type are associated with early Christian monastic and agricultural activity, and the Dingle Peninsula has an unusually dense concentration of them, reflecting the intensity of early medieval settlement along this westward reach of Ireland. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the peninsula.

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