Enclosure, Baile Na Bhfionnúrach, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Baile Na Bhfionnúrach, Co. Kerry

On the crest of a ridge running south-west from Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, a cluster of drystone structures sits embedded in the remains of an old field system, easy to overlook and easy to misread.

Most visitors to the Dingle Peninsula associate corbelled drystone buildings with the famous beehive huts near Fahan, but this group at Baile na bhFionnúrach operates on a more workaday scale, its two circular huts accompanied by four roughly-built sheep-pens and shelters. Corbelled construction, in which courses of dry, unmortared stone are laid so that each slightly overhangs the one below until they meet at the top, requires no timber and no mortar, and in an exposed upland environment that logic is immediately apparent.

The two huts differ considerably in complexity. The easternmost is modest, just 2.25 metres in diameter and 2 metres high, with a small rectangular enclosure abutting its south-east side and a single niche set into its interior wall, likely used for storing small objects or a lamp. The second hut is more elaborate. Its entrance, spanned by a lintel stone and facing west-south-west, opens into a rectangular yard measuring roughly 9 by 5.5 metres, which appears to be a later addition rather than an original feature. Inside, six wall niches are distributed around the interior, and directly opposite the entrance a low chamber extends approximately 2 metres back, partly hollowed into the thickness of the wall itself and partly running beneath the ground outside. The ruins of two further possible structures abut the north-west side of this hut, suggesting the complex grew incrementally over time. The fullest published account of the site appears in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage, which catalogued the extraordinary concentration of field monuments across the Dingle Peninsula.

The site sits within a landscape that has been shaped by generations of seasonal farming, and the sheep-pens here connect these prehistoric or early medieval huts to a much more recent pastoral tradition. The wall niches in the second hut are worth pausing over: six is an unusually high number, and their arrangement around the interior gives a sense of a space that was carefully organised, however rudimentary the construction appears from outside.

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