House - early medieval, Kimego, Co. Kerry

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House – early medieval, Kimego, Co. Kerry

At Kimego on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, the remains of an early medieval circular house survive only at their lowest level, a strip of walling averaging 1.2 metres wide that tells you more by what has been lost than by what remains.

What makes this particular fragment especially interesting is the way it was buried not by the slow accumulation of earth and time alone, but by another building entirely: the south-western side-wall of a later house, designated as house 4 in the archaeological record, was laid directly over it, sealing the earlier structure beneath.

Circular houses of this type are a recurring feature of early medieval Ireland, roughly spanning the period from the fifth to the twelfth century, and were typically constructed of stone or wattle and daub within enclosed farmsteads. The Iveragh Peninsula, which forms the long southwestern arm of Kerry reaching out into the Atlantic, has yielded a remarkable concentration of such remains, catalogued in detail by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of South Kerry published by Cork University Press. The Kimego site sits within this broader pattern of early medieval settlement activity along the peninsula, where generations of farming communities left behind overlapping traces of occupation. The overlay of one structure upon another here is a physical record of that layering, one household's wall becoming the foundation course of the next.

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