Hut site, Cloichearaí, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the mountain slopes east of Clogharee Lough in County Kerry, a small circular stone hut survives in rough pastureland with enough of its original fabric intact to feel genuinely ancient rather than merely ruined.
It is a corbelled drystone structure, meaning its walls were built without mortar and its roof formed by laying stones in gradually overlapping courses until they met at the top, a technique that requires no timber and no binding material, only patient, skilled stacking. At just under four metres in diameter and standing 1.72 metres high, with walls over a metre thick, it is compact but far from flimsy.
A second structure appears to have abutted the southern side of the main hut, though the evidence for this is slight. Corbelled huts of this kind are found across the Dingle Peninsula and the broader Corca Dhuibhne region, a landscape unusually dense with early ecclesiastical and secular remains. They are associated variously with early Christian monastic activity, seasonal pastoral use, and later periods of mountain farming, and it is rarely straightforward to assign a precise date or function to any individual example without excavation. This one was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a systematic effort to document the extraordinary concentration of field monuments across the area.