Hut site, Com An Bhúlaeraigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Com An Bhúlaeraigh, Co. Kerry

On the steep western slopes of the Garfinny valley, on a narrow grassy terrace cut into scree-scattered hillside, sit the very ruined remains of two circular stone huts built so close together that they share a wall.

What makes the pair quietly remarkable is the difference between them. The north-eastern hut was built using corbelling, a technique in which flat stones are laid in overlapping courses, each projecting slightly inward over the one below, until the gap narrows enough to be capped, forming a beehive-like roof without mortar or timber. The south-western hut shows no trace of this method at all. Both huts contain what appear to be small wall-cupboards, shallow recesses built into the interior stonework, a detail that gives the structures an unexpectedly domestic quality.

The site sits within the Corca Dhuibhne, or Dingle Peninsula, one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland, where early medieval and prehistoric remains crowd the hillsides in unusual concentrations. The south-western hut measures roughly 3.7 metres in diameter and stands to about 2 metres in height, which, given the description of the remains as very ruined, suggests the original walls were considerably more substantial. The structures were recorded as part of the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey, published in 1986 under the editorship of J. Cuppage. That survey catalogued an extraordinary range of field monuments across the peninsula, and this pair of conjoined huts, anonymous and difficult to date precisely, represents the kind of unassuming site that such systematic work was designed to preserve from total obscurity.

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