Hut site, An Baile Dubh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Within a double-ringed earthwork on the Dingle Peninsula, two small depressions in the ground mark what was once a pair of conjoined dwellings.
They are easy to overlook, barely 0.8 metres deep now, and their outlines are heavily disturbed, yet the basic arrangement is still legible: one hut roughly circular, the other rectangular, set side by side with a narrow opening between them less than a metre wide.
The site sits within a bivallate rath, meaning an enclosed farmstead defended by two concentric banks and ditches rather than the more common single ring. Raths of this kind were typically the homes of farming families in early medieval Ireland, the double circuit perhaps indicating a degree of status or simply a need for extra security for livestock. The two hut sites occupy the north-western sector of the interior. The circular hut measures 4.6 metres by 3.9 metres internally; the rectangular one reaches a maximum of 4.6 metres internally. That connecting entrance of 0.9 metres suggests the two structures functioned together, possibly as a dwelling and an adjacent work or storage space, though the disturbance to the remains makes any firm reading difficult. The details come from J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a thorough catalogue of the Dingle Peninsula's prehistoric and early historic monuments that remains a key reference for the area.
What survives is fragmentary, which is part of what makes it worth pausing over. The dimensions are domestic in the most literal sense, rooms scaled to a single family, set inside earthworks that have endured for well over a thousand years on the Atlantic edge of Kerry.