Hut site, Dún Sheáin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Dún Sheáin, Co. Kerry

On a large promontory pushing south-east into Dingle Bay, near the western edge of the entrance to Trabeg, a cluster of shallow circular depressions sits close to the cliff edge, easy to miss unless you know what you are looking at.

These are hut sites, the faint outlines of ancient dwellings scooped into the sloping ground and edged with a low enclosing bank on the open side, the hillside itself serving as a back wall. There are four grouped tightly together near the cliff, and a fifth a little further off near the south side of Coosgorm. Together they amount to one of those quietly legible traces of past habitation that the Dingle Peninsula holds in unusual abundance.

The sites range in diameter from three to five and a half metres, small spaces by any measure, built not on flat ground but angled into the incline in the way that takes advantage of natural shelter. This technique, cutting back into a slope to create a level floor and using the excavated material to raise a bank on the downhill side, is characteristic of early settlement across the Atlantic fringe of Ireland, where exposed headlands demanded practical responses to wind and weather. The details here were recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark regional study that catalogued an extraordinary density of monuments across this corner of County Kerry. Dún Sheáin itself sits within a landscape where placenames carry the prefix dún, meaning a fortified place or enclosure, and the surrounding area includes the features known in Irish as An Dún Mór and An Dún Beag, the large fort and the small fort, suggesting a long history of defended or bounded settlement on this headland above the bay.

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Pete F
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