Hut site, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Ballysitteragh mountain in County Kerry, two ancient circular huts sit joined together like a figure of eight pressed into the hillside.

They are not dramatic ruins; the walls have collapsed to stony banks no more than half a metre high, and one of the pair has been further disrupted by the construction of a modern rectangular building directly over its footprint. What remains is quietly legible nonetheless, the kind of site that rewards close attention rather than a glance from a distance.

The two foundations are conjoined, a layout sometimes described as a figure-of-eight or double hut, a form found at a number of early settlement sites across the west of Ireland. The western hut appears to have measured approximately five metres in diameter, though so little survives there that any reading of its original plan is tentative. Hut foundations of this kind, formed from dry-stone walling now reduced to low earthen and rubble banks, are typically associated with early medieval or prehistoric occupation, though without excavation a precise date remains difficult to assign. The site sits on a shoulder of the steep slope, a position that would have offered some shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather while keeping the occupants above the boggy ground lower down. The Dingle Peninsula has an unusually dense concentration of early archaeological remains, and this pair of foundations fits into a broader pattern of upland activity that includes field systems, souterrains (underground stone-lined passages often associated with storage or refuge), and other hut clusters across the same terrain. The site was recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a landmark study of the Dingle Peninsula that catalogued hundreds of monuments across this exceptionally rich landscape.

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