Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

On a small finger of land pushing southward into Dingle Bay, the ground holds traces of a settlement that most people walking the Corca Dhuibhne coast would pass without a second glance.

The site sits within a promontory fort, a type of enclosure where natural geography does much of the defensive work, the sea guarding the approaches on most sides while an earthen bank seals off the landward edge. Along the western side of this particular promontory, three hut-sites survive, their low outlines easy to mistake for the ordinary undulations of coastal ground.

The two northernmost structures are the better understood. Both are oval in plan, modest in scale, measuring roughly 5.7 by 2.1 metres and 5.2 by 1.8 metres internally, and each has an entrance gap set centrally along its eastern wall. They sit apart from one another and apart from the enclosing bank to the west, a detail that suggests some deliberate arrangement of the interior space rather than simple economy of building. The site was recorded under the townland name Monacarroge, or Móin na Caróige in Irish, a name drawn from the adjacent field. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted it in 1910, identifying it by that field name, and the site was later surveyed in detail as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a systematic study of the remarkable concentration of early remains across Corca Dhuibhne. The huts themselves have not been dated precisely from the available record, but oval stone structures of this kind on Irish promontories are generally associated with early medieval occupation, a period when small communities made use of coastal headlands for shelter, fishing, and farming on marginal land.

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