Hut site, An Blascaod Mór, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Blascaod Mór, Co. Kerry

On the Great Blasket Island, a few dozen metres of rough Atlantic hillside separate the known from the uncertain.

Here, in a cluster of low remains set roughly 75 metres south-west of a neighbouring group of structures, sits one confirmed hut site and two that archaeologists can only tentatively identify as such. The confirmed example is a subcircular foundation built in drystone, a technique requiring no mortar, just carefully stacked and chosen stone, measuring around three metres across and surviving to a modest height of 36 centimetres. That it survives at all, on an island abandoned by its last permanent residents in 1953 and battered by Atlantic weather ever since, is quietly remarkable.

The two possible hut sites take a different form. Rather than freestanding foundations, they are hollows cut back into the slope of the hill, their downslope sides enclosed by low stony banks, one oval in shape and measuring roughly 2.3 by 2 metres, the other sub-rectangular and considerably larger at about 3.6 by 5.35 metres. This technique of scooping a living or working space into a hillside, then banking up the exposed side, is practical and ancient, offering some shelter from wind and reducing the labour of full construction. Whether these particular examples are prehistoric, early medieval, or something more recent is not definitively established. They were documented by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986, a systematic effort to record the remarkable density of early remains across the Dingle Peninsula and its offshore islands.

An Blascaod Mór is accessible only by ferry from Dún Chaoin, and crossings depend entirely on weather and sea conditions. The island's landscape is steep and largely pathless beyond the old village, so reaching outlying clusters of remains like these requires careful footing and a reasonable sense of direction. The structures themselves are unenclosed and uninterpreted on the ground, small enough to pass without noticing if you are not specifically looking for the shallow banks and hollowed ground that mark them out.

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