House - indeterminate date, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

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House

House – indeterminate date, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

On a gently sloping hillside at Derrygorman on the Dingle Peninsula, two old enclosures sit just 2.6 metres apart, and inside one of them the walls of a substantial rectangular house have slowly collapsed into low stony ridges.

The setting is a univallate rath, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, consisting of a single earthen or stone bank encircling a domestic interior. What makes this particular example quietly unusual is not just its pairing with a near-identical neighbour, but the fact that both enclosures contain the remains of large rectangular buildings, suggesting a degree of planned organisation that still reads in the landscape today.

The northernmost of the two houses measures 9.8 metres east to west and 3.5 metres north to south internally. Most of the walling has long since tumbled into stony mounds, but along the south wall, isolated single courses of both the inner and outer faces survive, allowing a wall thickness of around 1.1 metres to be established. That is a solidly built structure. Doorways were placed in both the north and south walls in a directly opposed arrangement, a layout that would have created a through-passage across the interior. The description of this site was first compiled by J. Cuppage as part of the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a detailed regional study that brought many such low-profile sites into clearer focus. When these buildings were actually constructed remains unknown; no date has been established for either the houses or the enclosures that contain them.

The site sits on a very gentle south-facing slope that, even now, opens up views in every direction, which may well explain why whoever built here chose this particular ground. The walls are largely reduced to grass-covered mounds, so a visitor would need to pick out the faint line of stonework along the south wall rather than expect anything upstanding.

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