House - indeterminate date, Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry

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House

House – indeterminate date, Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry

On the lower north-western slopes of Cummeen mountain in County Kerry, tucked against the wall of an ancient cashel, a shallow rectangular hollow in the ground is just about all that remains of a dwelling whose age nobody has been able to pin down.

The cashel itself, known in Irish as An Chathair Bhán and in English as Caherbaun, looks out over the valley of the Owencashla river, and it is in the angle between that enclosing stone wall and a neighbouring house that this second structure quietly survives. A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval type, essentially a fortified farmstead; finding subsidiary structures built into or against its walls is not unusual on the Dingle Peninsula, but the ambiguity surrounding this particular building gives it a quality that the tidier, better-dated sites lack.

What the ground preserves is a rectangular depression, its western side formed by the cashel wall itself, its southern side by the north-western wall of an adjacent house, and its eastern side by an extension of that same wall running northward to meet the cashel again. Some footing stones remain visible in the sides of the hollow near its western end. From these traces, the hut appears to have measured roughly six metres north to south and three and a half metres east to west, making it a modest space by any standard. The description comes from the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage, a systematic examination of the Dingle Peninsula that brought structures like this one into the documented record for the first time. No date has been established for the building; it shares its enclosure with the cashel but whether it is broadly contemporary with it, or represents a later reuse of a convenient sheltered corner, remains an open question.

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