Hut site, An Baile Dubh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Baile Dubh, Co. Kerry

At An Baile Dubh on the Dingle Peninsula, a pair of shallow depressions in the ground mark what were once two conjoined huts.

They sit inside a bivallate rath, a type of enclosed farmstead defined by two concentric earthen banks, and the fact that two huts appear to have shared a common entrance gives the site an unusually domestic intimacy for something now reduced almost entirely to hollows in the soil.

The remains occupy the north-west sector of the rath's interior and are badly disturbed, but their outlines can still be read. One hut was roughly circular, measuring approximately 4.6 metres by 3.9 metres internally; the other was rectangular, with a maximum internal measurement of around 4.6 metres. Between them, a gap of roughly 0.9 metres wide is thought to represent a shared entrance or connecting passage. The combination of a circular and a rectangular plan in a single joined structure is worth pausing over: it suggests adaptation or incremental building rather than a single designed unit, which is precisely the kind of domestic archaeology that rarely survives in any visible form. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a systematic fieldwork project covering the Corca Dhuibhne area.

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