Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

On a small promontory pushing southward into Dingle Bay, three ancient hut-sites occupy the western edge of a coastal fort, their low stone outlines hinting at lives lived close to the water and the wind.

What makes this cluster unusual is the spatial arrangement of the structures themselves: two oval huts sit detached from each other and from the enclosing bank beside them, each with an entrance gap cut into its eastern side, while a third, smaller structure presses against both its northern neighbour and the bank, as if slotted deliberately into whatever space remained. A promontory fort is a site where natural coastal geography does much of the defensive work, with the sea cutting off two or three sides and a constructed bank or ditch sealing the landward approach. Here, the huts are not scattered randomly within that enclosure but arranged in a loose line, suggesting some degree of planning in how the space was used.

The site sits within an area known as Monacarroge, or Móin na Caróige in Irish, a name drawn from the adjacent field rather than from any surviving historical record of the site itself. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp noted it under that field name in 1910. The two larger huts measure roughly 5.7 by 2.1 metres and 5.2 by 1.8 metres internally, dimensions that speak to simple, functional shelter rather than anything elaborate. The smallest of the three, at just 2.4 by 1.5 metres internally, is tighter still. Archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula carried out by J. Cuppage and published in 1986 as part of the Corca Dhuibhne survey provides the principal description of the site, placing it within a broader landscape on the peninsula that is unusually dense with early remains.

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