Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slope of Corrin Hill in Cool, County Kerry, four raths sit clustered within short distances of one another, a concentration that immediately sets this landscape apart from the more isolated examples found elsewhere on the Dingle Peninsula.

A rath is a ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead or dwelling during the early medieval period in Ireland. What makes this particular site especially interesting is the interior of one of these raths, which contains not a single dwelling space but three conjoined huts arranged together within the same enclosure.

The three huts are circular in plan and share walls, forming a kind of cellular cluster rather than separate structures. The northernmost hut measures roughly 3.5 metres in diameter internally, a modest space by any reckoning, enclosed by a bank of grass-grown stones that rises to about 75 centimetres on the interior face but barely registers at 10 centimetres on the outside. That asymmetry is typical of such structures, where material was piled inward to define and shelter the living space rather than to present any outward face. An entrance gap opens roughly to the north-east, though it is described as ill-defined, suggesting the threshold has softened considerably over the centuries. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a foundational reference for the archaeology of this part of Kerry, and the cluster of four raths in close proximity to one another here points to a community of some density at whatever period these enclosures were in active use.

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