House - early medieval, Coarha More, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
On Valentia Island off the south-west coast of Kerry, a low peaty rise conceals the remains of a small early medieval settlement that most visitors to the island will walk past without a second glance.
Three ruined huts sit within the remnants of an old field system, the whole complex occupying an area of roughly a hundred metres in radius, just south-west of Coosatorinth in the townland of Coarha More. Small, quiet, and easy to miss, the cluster has the quality of something that was always meant to disappear back into the land.
The most legible of the huts stands to the west of the group. It is rectangular, divided into two rooms, and measures approximately 5.7 metres by 3.7 metres, with a basal row of upright stones still visible at ground level. That construction technique, setting large flat stones on end to form the lowest course of a wall, is characteristic of early medieval building in Ireland, roughly the period between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The surrounding field system, its boundaries still faintly traceable beneath the peat, suggests this was not a temporary camp but a worked landscape, a place where people farmed and lived over some duration. The archaeologist Mitchell proposed an early medieval date for the cluster in 1989, a conclusion later adopted in the comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996.