Hut site, An Coimín, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Coimín, Co. Kerry

On the steep southern slopes of Sea Hill above Dingle Bay, three cashels sit in rough open moorland within striking distance of one another.

A cashel is a dry-stone ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, and finding one in a landscape is unremarkable enough. Finding three clustered together, surrounded by further stone structures whose purpose remains genuinely unclear, is rather more interesting.

At the centre of one cashel sits a mound of stones roughly 3.1 metres in external diameter, which may be the collapsed remains of a hut site or, equally plausibly, a sheep-shelter of much later date. A second small mound abuts the cashel wall to the south-west. Directly to the east lie the ruined foundations of a large rectangular structure, 13 metres north to south and 5 metres east to west, divided internally by cross-walls into three separate sections. Between its southern end and the cashel wall is a circular foundation about 2 metres in diameter, its wall worn down to a single course of small stones. An irregular heap of stones lies just to the east of that southern end. Archaeologist J. Cuppage, whose 1986 survey of the Dingle Peninsula recorded these features, noted plainly that it is not clear what these structures represent, nor whether they are contemporary with the cashel itself. That uncertainty has not been resolved since.

What lingers about this site is precisely that open question. The rectangular building, subdivided into three rooms, could suggest a later agricultural use, a dwelling, or something else entirely. The circular foundation beside it fits no obvious pattern. The moorland setting means the stonework has never been built over or tidied away, leaving these ambiguous shapes sitting more or less as they were found, waiting for an interpretation that has not yet arrived.

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Pete F
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