Hut site, An Gabhlán Beag, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Gabhlán Beag, Co. Kerry

On a quiet stretch of the Dingle Peninsula at An Gabhlán Beag, a ring of upright stone slabs marks the outline of a small oval hut that has been standing, in one form or another, for an unknown stretch of centuries.

What makes it worth pausing over is not its size but its legibility: the structure is compact enough, at roughly seven metres east to west and just under five metres north to south internally, that you can read its shape almost at a glance, the low slabs averaging about seventy centimetres in height still describing the room that once existed inside them.

The floor level sits some thirty-five centimetres below the surrounding ground, a feature found in a number of early Irish hut sites, where scooping the interior below grade helped with insulation and stability. The probable entrance faces south-east, one side marked by a collapsed upright slab and the other by drystone walling, the kind of unmortared stone construction that relies entirely on the careful fitting of dry stones for its strength. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a thorough regional study that catalogued many such structures across this particularly dense archaeological landscape in west Kerry.

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