Hut site, An Tír, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Tír, Co. Kerry

In the back yard of a disused farmhouse at An Tír on the Dingle Peninsula, a small circular structure sits in quiet obscurity, its age and original purpose left largely to the imagination.

Built entirely without mortar, drystone construction of this kind relies on the careful fitting of stones against one another, a technique used across millennia in Ireland for everything from field boundaries to beehive-shaped shelters. This particular example is modest in scale, just under four metres in diameter and less than one and a half metres high, with walls roughly one and a half metres thick. That wall thickness, substantial relative to the interior space, is characteristic of early clocháns, the corbelled stone huts associated with early Christian monastic life and pastoral settlement along the western seaboard, though no precise date has been established for this one.

The structure was recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986 under the authorship of J. Cuppage. That survey documented the remarkable concentration of prehistoric and early historic monuments across one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland, a coastline where field monuments survive in unusual numbers partly because the land was never heavily modernised. The hut at An Tír is one among many such small stone buildings catalogued in that work, each contributing to a picture of how people lived, worked, and sheltered in this part of Kerry across a very long stretch of time.

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Pete F
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