Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

On open mountain terrain above the northern end of Com an Lochaigh, on the Dingle Peninsula in Co. Kerry, two small stone structures sit largely as they were built, their walls still standing to a height that hints at how snugly enclosed their interiors once were.

What makes them quietly remarkable is not their size but their construction: both are corbelled drystone huts, built without mortar, with each course of stone angled slightly inward until the walls converge into a roof. It is a technique of considerable antiquity on the Irish Atlantic seaboard, and here it has survived the mountain weather with some integrity.

The two huts differ in form and detail. The first is oval, measuring roughly 2.58 by 1.42 metres across, with walls about 1.15 metres high and 0.7 metres thick. Small as that sounds, the proportions suggest something purpose-built for shelter or storage rather than permanent habitation. The second is larger and roughly circular, between 3.14 and 3.43 metres in diameter and standing 2.1 metres high, and it includes four lintelled niches set into the wall, small recessed alcoves framed with flat stones across the top. These niches are a detail worth pausing over: they imply deliberate interior organisation, spaces for keeping tools, food, or devotional objects within easy reach. The site was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey, a detailed inventory of the remarkable concentration of early remains across the Dingle Peninsula, and remains one of many such structures recorded across this landscape that connected coastal settlement with mountain pasture.

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