Hut site, Cill Chúile, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Chúile, Co. Kerry

On the northern slopes of Reenconnell in Co. Kerry, part of a very old drystone structure has been quietly absorbed into a field boundary, its original purpose still legible if you know what to look for.

The surviving section belongs to a corbelled hut, a type of building in which flat stones are laid in overlapping horizontal courses, each layer projecting slightly inward over the one below until the walls close to form a roof without any timber or mortar. What remains stands around 1.6 metres high and describes a rough circle somewhere between three and four metres across, dimensions modest enough to suggest a single-person shelter or a small ancillary structure rather than a dwelling for a family.

The site at Cill Chúile sits within a landscape that has been extensively surveyed for its early remains. The Dingle Peninsula, known in Irish as Corca Dhuibhne, carries an unusually dense concentration of early medieval and prehistoric monuments, from promontory forts and souterrains to beehive clochán cells associated with early Christian monasticism. This particular structure was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 archaeological survey of the peninsula, a volume that documented hundreds of sites across this compact but extraordinarily layered stretch of the Kerry coast. The corbelled technique visible here has a very long history in the area; similar construction appears in structures ranging from the late prehistoric period through to early medieval monastic use, and it is not always easy to assign a confident date to a fragment this size without excavation.

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