Hut site, Baile Uí Uaithnín, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile Uí Uaithnín, Co. Kerry

On the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a small circular structure sits in the landscape at Baile Uí Uaithnín, modest in scale but belonging to a tradition of building that is thousands of years old.

The structure is corbelled, meaning its walls curve inward as they rise, with each ring of dry-laid stone projecting slightly further than the one below it, until the courses meet overhead without the need for mortar or timber. The result is a self-supporting stone cell, and this one measures just 2.7 metres across and stands 1.2 metres high, its walls ranging between roughly one and one and a half metres thick. It has been partly rebuilt at some point, so what survives today is a mixture of original fabric and later intervention.

Attached to its western side is a small ruined chamber, roughly 1.8 by 2 metres internally, suggesting the site was once more than a single isolated cell. Whether the two elements were in use simultaneously, or whether one preceded the other, is not recorded. The site lies roughly 40 to 50 metres north of a separate monument, the reference KE044-002, indicating this part of the peninsula holds a concentration of early remains rather than isolated survivals. The Dingle Peninsula as a whole is extraordinarily dense with early medieval and prehistoric archaeology, and corbelled hut sites of this kind are associated with early Christian monastic activity as well as earlier pastoral and seasonal occupation. J. Cuppage documented this structure in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey, a foundational record of the peninsula's field monuments that catalogued sites across a landscape that had seen continuous human use for millennia.

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