Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Baile Breac, Co. Kerry

Two ancient circular huts on the lower western slopes of the Brandon mountain range have been so thoroughly absorbed into a later field wall that, at a glance, they read simply as part of the landscape's working infrastructure.

A third hut lies roughly fifteen metres to the south-west, slightly apart from its companions, and together the three form a small cluster of early settlement that has quietly persisted in rough pastureland without much fanfare.

The pair of conjoined huts, built in the corbelled or dry-stone circular style common to early medieval and possibly earlier occupation sites along the Dingle Peninsula, each measure between 4.4 and 4.9 metres in diameter and stand to a surviving height of 1.6 metres. One of the two retains what may be an independent entrance on its south-western side, suggesting the structures were not simply ancillary shelters but had some degree of considered internal arrangement. The site sits within the area surveyed by J. Cuppage for the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986, a systematic study of the Dingle Peninsula that documented the extraordinary density of prehistoric and early historic remains across this part of west Kerry. An Baile Breac itself, a townland on the flanks of the Brandon range, sits in territory long associated with early Christian and pre-Christian activity, the mountain above it being one of the great pilgrimage sites of early Ireland.

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