House - indeterminate date, Imileá An Bhóthair, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
Within the enclosure of a bivallate rath on low-lying ground south of Smerwick Harbour, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, there may once have been a house.
The qualification matters: the structure recorded at the centre of this earthwork is listed as a possible house site, its date indeterminate, its nature unresolved. That uncertainty is itself part of what makes the site worth pausing over.
A bivallate rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure defined by two concentric banks and ditches, a form of enclosed farmstead associated broadly with early medieval Ireland, though examples can be difficult to date precisely without excavation. The rath at Imileá An Bhóthair sits in the low ground near Smerwick Harbour, a stretch of coastline on the far western tip of the Corca Dhuibhne, or Dingle, peninsula. Within its doubled earthen rings, the remains at the centre were noted as a possible habitation site by J. Cuppage in the 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a detailed study of the area's exceptionally dense prehistoric and early historic landscape. Whether what survives at the centre once constituted a dwelling, or something else entirely, remains an open question. The monument has been protected under a preservation order dating to 1939, one of the earlier such designations in the state.