Hut site, Slieve, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern side of the Emlagh river valley, in rough pastureland on the Dingle Peninsula, a low ring of stones sits in the grass.
It is easy to miss, and that is partly what makes it interesting. What survives is a circular foundation, barely thirty-five centimetres high, roughly two and a half metres across, with walls about one and three-quarter metres thick. Those proportions, walls nearly as wide as the interior space they enclose, suggest something built to last rather than something thrown up in a hurry.
This is a possible hut foundation, the kind of structure that appears in some numbers across the Corca Dhuibhne landscape, the westernmost stretch of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. The Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, published by J. Cuppage in 1986 under the Irish-language title that reflects the area's strong Gaelic identity, catalogued sites like this one across a region that has been continuously farmed and settled for thousands of years. Circular hut foundations of this type are generally associated with early medieval or prehistoric occupation, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date. The thickness of the wall relative to the overall diameter is a recurring feature of dry-stone construction in Atlantic Ireland, where builders compensated for the limitations of unmortared stone by making the walls themselves do the structural work.