Hut site, Cloichear, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cloichear, Co. Kerry

Tucked into a working farmyard in Clogher village on the Dingle Peninsula, there is a small circular stone hut that looks, at first glance, like something lifted from the early medieval landscape of Kerry.

It is complete, intact, and only three metres across and just over three metres high, which means standing inside it is less like entering a building and more like stepping into a stone barrel. What makes it quietly puzzling is the detail: a lintelled doorway, a small wall-cupboard set into the stonework, and a window, none of which you would typically expect in the ancient clochán tradition it superficially resembles.

The construction method is corbelling, a technique in which courses of flat stones are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, gradually closing the roof without any timber or mortar to hold the arch. Corbelled structures appear all over the Dingle Peninsula and are associated in the popular imagination with early Christian monks or Iron Age farmers. This one, however, complicates that story. Mortar was used in its construction, which points strongly to a more recent origin, possibly the eighteenth or nineteenth century, when the same ancient building form was still being used for practical agricultural purposes. A second corbelled hut was apparently once present a short distance to the south in the same village, though local knowledge suggests it no longer survives. The Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey, published by J. Cuppage in 1986, recorded this structure along with that now-vanished neighbour, giving some sense of how common such buildings once were in the area even in relatively recent centuries.

The hut sits in an active farmyard, so it is the kind of place where a polite word with the landowner is the sensible approach before going to look closely. The wall-cupboard is worth particular attention, a small domestic touch that suggests the building served a specific, if now uncertain, everyday purpose rather than being merely a shelter or store.

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Pete F
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