Hut site, An Blascaod Mór, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the Great Blasket Island, off the tip of the Dingle Peninsula, a cluster of seven ancient hut sites sits scattered across the hillside, most of them low and easy to miss.
What makes the group quietly remarkable is not any single structure but the way several of them connect. Three of the huts are clocháns, the beehive-shaped dry-stone cells built without mortar, using a corbelling technique in which each course of stone is laid slightly inward until the courses eventually meet overhead. Two of these are definitively identified, circular in plan, and linked to one another by a lintelled passage, a short covered corridor formed by flat stones laid across the top. The larger of the two, to the north, stands about 1.44 metres high internally and measures roughly 3.45 metres across, with an entrance on its eastern side that leads either outward or toward a possible third conjoined cell.
The remaining four huts in the group are less well preserved. One is a sub-rectangular hollow, roughly 9.8 by 6 metres, defined by a low stony bank running along its downhill edge. Two others are circular foundations, one just about 3 metres in diameter, and another corbelled example sits around 6 metres to the northwest of a possible sixth site, an oval hollow similarly banked on the slope side. This combination of construction styles, some corbelled and domed, others reduced to little more than a depression in the ground, suggests activity over a long period or by people working in different traditions. The site was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey, published by Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne in Ballyferriter, and remains one of the more concentrated early settlement groupings on the island.
The Great Blasket was evacuated in 1953 when its last permanent residents were moved to the mainland, but human presence there goes back far earlier than the modern village. Visiting the island today means taking a ferry from Dunquin, and the landscape is largely open and unenclosed. The hut sites lie away from the more frequently visited village ruins, and their low profiles mean they reward careful navigation rather than casual walking. The two linked clocháns, with their surviving internal height and connecting passage, are the most legible of the group.