Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the steep, rock-strewn lower slopes at the eastern end of Com an Lochaigh, two circular stone huts sit roughly 75 metres apart beside the western wall of a long-disused field.
They are corbelled drystone structures, meaning their walls were built without mortar and their roofs formed by gradually overlapping stone courses until the gap closed at the top, a technique with deep roots in early Irish building. There is no grand monument here, no interpretive panel, just two small structures that have quietly outlasted almost everything built around them.
The northern hut is the better documented of the pair. Its lintelled entrance, formed by a flat stone laid across the opening, measures just half a metre wide and 0.65 metres high, meaning entry would have required stooping low. Inside, the space is modest: roughly 1.95 by 1.7 metres across and standing about 2 metres high. Two small lintelled niches are set into the interior wall, likely used for storage or perhaps to hold a lamp. A short distance to the south of the northern hut sits a roughly constructed enclosure. The site was recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the Dingle Peninsula, which remains one of the more thorough accounts of this landscape's layered prehistory and early medieval remains.