Hut site, Com An Bhúlaeraigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Dingle Peninsula, in the Irish-speaking heartland of Corca Dhuibhne, a low ring of stones barely rises above the ground at Com An Bhúlaeraigh.
What remains of this circular hut is, by any measure, fragmentary: a diameter of roughly three metres, walls surviving to no more than seventy-five centimetres in height and about one-point-two metres thick. That wall thickness relative to the overall diameter is telling. These were not flimsy structures. Circular stone huts of this kind, found in considerable numbers across the Dingle Peninsula, were built to endure Atlantic weather, their mass doing the work that mortar never would.
The site was catalogued as part of the Corca Dhuibhne Archaeological Survey, published in 1986 under the authorship of J. Cuppage. That survey, produced in association with Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne, remains a foundational document for understanding the density and variety of early remains across this corner of Kerry. The hut at Com An Bhúlaeraigh appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map, which places its recognition, at least in cartographic terms, somewhere in the late nineteenth century. Whether it dates to the early medieval period, when single-family farmsteads of this circular form were common across Ireland, or to some other era, the available record does not say with precision.