Hut site, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of Ballysitteragh and Beennabrack mountain, in rough rocky pasture that has long since passed out of serious cultivation, two small stone structures sit about twenty metres apart.
They are easy to overlook, low and circular, built without mortar. One of them still has its roof intact, which is the more remarkable detail: a corbelled dome, each course of stone slightly overlapping the last, sealed at the apex with a single flat slab. Inside, the space measures roughly three metres across and just over two metres from floor to cap. It is not large, but it is complete, which in structures of this kind is genuinely unusual.
Corbelled drystone construction, where walls are built inward in successive rings until they meet at the top, is a technique with deep roots across the Dingle Peninsula. The resulting beehive-shaped cells, sometimes called clocháns, appear in monastic and agricultural contexts throughout the region, though assigning a precise date or function to any individual example is rarely straightforward. Here, the context is agricultural rather than devotional: rudimentary sheep shelters and old field walls are visible nearby, suggesting this shoulder of mountain was once worked as upland pasture. The southern hut, the one with its roof surviving, has a lintelled entrance barely eighty centimetres high and narrowing slightly as it goes inward, which is a typical feature of this construction type. The northern hut is built on a more substantial scale, with walls reaching over a metre thick in places, but its roof has collapsed and its entrance has been blocked up at some point, leaving it considerably less legible than its neighbour. Both structures were documented by J. Cuppage as part of the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey.
The site sits in open mountain terrain without formal access infrastructure, and the surroundings remain rough grazing land. The surviving corbelled roof of the southern hut is the principal point of interest, and crouching through the low entrance to see the interior stonework is straightforward enough if the ground is dry. The collapsed state of the northern hut makes its scale harder to appreciate from the outside, but the thickness of the standing wall sections gives some sense of how substantial the original structure was.