House - early medieval, Kimego, Co. Kerry

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House

House – early medieval, Kimego, Co. Kerry

At Kimego on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a fragment of curved wall survives beneath the ground surface, most of it gone, but enough remaining to tell a layered story.

What was recorded here is the northern arc of a circular hut wall, an early medieval dwelling of the kind once common across early Christian Ireland, built round and low, and constructed from stone. What makes this particular remnant quietly significant is its position: the surviving portion was found tucked beneath the north-eastern side-wall of a later structure on the same site, meaning one building was raised directly over the bones of another.

Circular stone huts of this type, sometimes called clocháns when corbelled and dry-stone built, were a characteristic form of early medieval domestic and monastic architecture in Kerry, and the Iveragh Peninsula preserves a notable concentration of them. The stratigraphic relationship here, where an older curved wall disappears under a newer straight one, suggests the site was occupied across more than one period, with the later rectangular or rectilinear building superseding the earlier round hut without entirely erasing it. The details come from the archaeological survey of south Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, which remains a foundational reference for the early medieval archaeology of this part of Munster. The monument is protected under a preservation order dating to 1940.

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