Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a rocky shoulder of the western slopes of Ballysitteragh mountain in County Kerry, two small stone huts sit joined together, each barely taller than a person and no wider than a modest room.
What makes them quietly remarkable is the way they were built: corbelled drystone construction, meaning the walls were raised by laying flat stones in overlapping, inward-leaning courses until they met at the top, with no mortar holding any of it together. This technique, found elsewhere on the Dingle Peninsula and across early medieval Ireland, produced surprisingly durable structures, and these two have survived long enough to retain measurable walls still standing to 1.38 metres. The pair are conjoined, almost certainly connected by a communicating doorway, yet each has its own independent entrance facing south-east.
The huts were recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published by J. Cuppage in 1986. The two chambers differ slightly in size, one measuring 3.54 metres in diameter and the other 3.8 metres, with walls approximately 1.3 metres thick. The smaller of the two, positioned to the north-east, contains a detail easy to overlook from outside: a small lintelled niche set into the interior wall, its opening spanned by a single flat stone. Such niches were sometimes used for storage or to hold a lamp, though their precise function in any given structure is rarely certain. The walls throughout are roughly 1.3 metres thick, which accounts for much of the solidity that has kept them standing on an exposed mountain spur above the Atlantic coastline of the Dingle Peninsula.