Hut site, An Riasc, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Riasc, Co. Kerry

A roughly circular ringfort sitting in the low-lying crescent of land around Smerwick Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula is not, on the surface, an easy thing to read.

Dense ferns and briars make close inspection difficult, and what survives of its interior huts is fragmentary at best. Yet the site carries a name that hints at something more deliberate beneath the ground: Clochán na nUamhan, where uamhain means cave, strongly suggesting the one-time presence of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or concealment.

Two hut-sites are recorded within the ringfort's interior. The second of the pair, the subject of J. Cuppage's 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, is the less well-preserved of the two. It appears to have been sub-rectangular, with internal dimensions of roughly three metres east to west and two metres north to south. Its walls survive now mainly as a mound of collapsed stone, though a short stretch of the inner wall-face on the southern side still stands to a height of about thirty centimetres. The ringfort sits approximately a hundred metres north of the early ecclesiastical site at Reask, a monastic enclosure whose carved cross-slabs and ogham stone, a type of early medieval inscription carved in a system of notches along a central line, draw considerably more attention from visitors than its unassuming neighbour to the north.

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Pete F
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