Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

On the western slopes of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, there is a small stone structure that has quietly outlasted whatever purpose it was built to serve.

It is a corbelled drystone hut, roughly subcircular in plan, standing about three metres high and measuring between 2.7 and 3 metres across internally. Corbelling is a building technique in which each successive course of stones projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing to form a roof without the need for mortar or timber. The result is a self-supporting stone beehive, a form found across the Dingle Peninsula and closely associated with early monastic and pastoral traditions of the area.

The hut opens at its south-southeast face onto an irregularly shaped yard of roughly fifteen metres at its widest, and built against the outer wall to the southwest is a lintelled sheep-shelter, a simple lean-to construction roofed with flat stones laid across upright supports. About six metres to the south, a natural rockshelter sits in the hillside, and a short distance to the west another sheep-shelter appears to have been constructed directly on the remains of a second hut, the earlier structure absorbed into the later one. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark regional study that recorded hundreds of monuments across this exceptionally dense archaeological landscape. An Baile Breac, the townland in which the hut sits, takes its name from the Irish for speckled settlement, a description that suits a hillside scattered with the quiet remnants of occupation across many centuries.

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Pete F
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