Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

On a rough, rocky slope above the boggy plain of the Feohanagh river, a cluster of four conjoined stone structures sits quietly in enclosed pastureland, looking at first glance like a collapsed farmyard.

Look more carefully, though, and two of those structures reveal themselves to be corbelled drystone huts, a building technique in which stones are laid in overlapping horizontal courses, each ring slightly smaller than the last, until the walls curve inward to form a roof without any timber or mortar. The eastern hut is circular, nearly five metres across internally, with walls that survive to over two metres in height and reach an extraordinary 5.5 metres in thickness at their greatest point. Tucked into the masonry on the eastern side is what appears to be a wall-cupboard, a small recess whose presence suggests this was once a domestic space, however austere.

The western hut is sub-rectangular, roughly 5.4 by 5.6 metres inside, its walls lower but still largely intact. A passage once connected the two huts directly, though it is now blocked, and each appears to have had its own independent entrance as well. Attached to this pair of older, more carefully constructed buildings are two further enclosures, almost certainly added later as sheep-folds. One opens off the eastern hut into a walled yard measuring nine metres east to west, equipped with a lintelled sheep gap in its eastern wall and a small lintelled shelter in the corner of the western hut's interior, likely built to protect lambs. The second fold, abutting the northern side of the western hut, is cruder in construction, its thin, loosely built walls a clear contrast to the precision of the corbelled stonework beside it. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which covered the Corca Dhuibhne region in detail.

What makes the complex so quietly compelling is this layering of use across time. The corbelled huts belong to a tradition of drystone building found across the Dingle Peninsula, where such structures range in date from early medieval to post-medieval periods, often impossible to pin down without excavation. The later sheep-folds built against and around them suggest the site never fell entirely out of use, each generation finding in the older stonework something still worth keeping.

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Pete F
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