Hut site, Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, Co. Kerry

On the southernmost of the Blasket Islands, about a hundred metres from the remains of an Early Christian monastery, a low bank of earth and stone traces the outline of a circular hut so small that three or four people standing inside it would fill it.

The wall survives to less than a metre in height, reduced over centuries to a grassy ridge, but its circular plan is still legible, measuring just 3.2 metres across internally. What makes this modest remnant quietly arresting is its position: folded against the south wall of a roughly oval field that itself abuts a rocky crag, the whole arrangement suggests deliberate organisation on a remote Atlantic island that most people today would struggle to reach at all.

Inishvickillane, known in Irish as Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, covers 199 acres and lies seven miles south-west of Slea Head, with the nearest embarkation point at Dunquin pier some nine miles away. The Early Christian monastic settlement sits at the south-eastern end of the island, on the eastern slopes of a rocky outcrop that rises prominently above the surrounding ground. The hut foundation lies just to the south-west of that complex, and its relationship to the monastery is suggestive, though not fully resolved. Early Christian monastic settlements in Ireland frequently included satellite structures, small cells or ancillary buildings occupied by monks seeking greater solitude or carrying out agricultural work at a distance from the main enclosure. Whether this hut served such a purpose, or predates the monastery, or belonged to a later phase of island life, the physical evidence alone cannot say. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which documented the dense concentration of prehistoric and early medieval remains across the Corca Dhuibhne region.

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