House - indeterminate date, Dromavally, Co. Kerry

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House

House – indeterminate date, Dromavally, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Dromavally on the Dingle Peninsula, a cashel, that is a stone-walled early medieval enclosure, reveals itself only gradually to anyone who knows to look.

On the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map, the site registered as little more than a slight curve in the townland boundary line, the cartographers apparently seeing no more than a landscape irregularity. On the ground, though, the enclosing wall can still be traced all the way around its perimeter, and within that circuit two rectangular house sites survive alongside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with storage or refuge in early Irish settlements.

One of the two house sites sits hard against the western stretch of the cashel wall. Its internal dimensions, 8.3 metres east to west and 5.3 metres north to south, give a sense of a modest but deliberate dwelling, built in drystone construction without mortar, with walls roughly 1.2 metres wide and still standing to around half a metre in height. There were once two opposed entrances, one through the north wall and one through the south, though both have been defaced over time and can no longer be read clearly. The date of the structure remains indeterminate, which is itself a common condition for this kind of vernacular building on the peninsula, where the physical evidence survives but the historical record does not. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey, a substantial regional study covering the Corca Dhuibhne area.

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