Hut site, Na Cluainte, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Na Cluainte, Co. Kerry

At a place known in Irish as Ulaidh an Draghbháil, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, the ground holds the outlines of what may have been both a settlement and a burial place.

An ovate enclosure, the kind of roughly oval earthwork boundary that recurs across early Irish landscapes, contains within it possible traces of hut sites alongside what appear to be graves. The combination is not unusual in early medieval Ireland, where the boundaries between the domestic and the sacred were often less fixed than later centuries would make them, but it gives the site a quietly layered quality.

Directly south of the enclosure's south-western entrance, pressed up against the outer face of the enclosure bank, are the remains of a rectangular structure measuring approximately 7.7 by 2.2 metres internally. Its walls have been reduced over time to low, stony banks, with some stones still set on edge in a way that may reflect the original wall faces. The dimensions are modest, barely wider than a corridor, suggesting a narrow ancillary building rather than a principal dwelling. J. Cuppage documented the site in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which remains one of the more thorough regional surveys of its kind in Ireland, and it is from that record that the site's particulars are drawn.

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