Hut site, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

Above Coumeenoole bay on the Dingle Peninsula, a cluster of low stone structures sits in rough, rocky pastureland, their original purpose quietly disputed.

Known as Clochán na mBardán, the group of seven drystone-built buildings rises no more than 1.5 metres at its highest point, and the question of what exactly they once were has never been fully resolved. At least three have been identified as relatively recent sheep-shelters, which is straightforward enough, but the remainder occupy a more ambiguous category, somewhere between ancient habitation and agricultural convenience, their ruinous condition making it genuinely difficult to say which.

The most complete of the structures is a small circular building, 3.6 metres in diameter with walls roughly a metre thick, that has been absorbed into a later sheep-fold, the older fabric and the newer use now inseparable at a glance. More intriguingly, this building appears to contain a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often interpreted as a place of storage, refuge, or concealment. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister noted the site in 1899, and it was subsequently documented as part of the wider Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986. The name Clochán na mBardán refers to the beehive-style drystone construction technique common to this part of Kerry, where clocháin, small corbelled stone cells, appear across the peninsula in varying states of preservation and reuse.

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