Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry

On the western slopes of Ballysitteragh mountain in County Kerry, a low stone hut sits in rough mountain pasture with a passage built into its own wall that is so narrow at the entrance that a person could not fit through it.

This is not a flaw in the design; it is the puzzle. The passage, L-shaped and running through the thickness of the wall itself, begins at just 27 centimetres high and 36 centimetres wide, barely large enough for a cat, yet it opens out slightly as it continues inward, reaching at least 40 centimetres in height before extending back 1.2 metres and then bending west along the line of the wall for an unknown further distance.

The structure is a clochaun, the Irish term for a dry-stone corbelled hut, built without mortar by stacking and angling stones inward until they meet at the top. This one is circular, with an interior diameter of 4.4 metres and walls 1.25 metres thick, rising to 1.4 metres in height. A lintelled entrance passage faces east-south-east, while the mysterious mural passage sits in the south-south-east section of the wall. A rectangular animal pen adjoins the hut on its south-west side, and a small lintelled chamber in the pen's northern corner may connect to the internal passage, though the wall in that area has been rebuilt at some point and the relationship between the two features cannot be confirmed. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map was made, three clochauns were recorded at this location; only this one survives. J. Cuppage documented the site in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey of Corca Dhuibhne, which remains a key reference for this stretch of the Kerry coastline and its hinterland.

The site sits in open mountain terrain, and the surviving hut retains enough of its original fabric to give a clear sense of the corbelling technique and the unusual complexity of its walls. The mural passage, whatever its original purpose, adds a quality of deliberate ingenuity to what might otherwise appear a simple rural shelter.

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Pete F
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