Hut site, An Luachair, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, An Luachair, Co. Kerry

Within a rath on a steep south-easterly slope above the Emlagh river valley, a small circular hut survives in a state that is easy to overlook: its walls reduced to a low bank of earth and stone, its doorway nothing more than a gap roughly a metre wide facing the north-east.

What makes the site quietly interesting is not any single dramatic feature but the layering of it. A rath, which is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically of early medieval date, contains within it a raised northern platform, and on that platform sit the hut and three depressions of unknown origin, their purpose unrecorded and apparently unresolved.

The hut itself is modest in scale, measuring approximately 4.3 metres north to south and 5 metres east to west internally. Its enclosing wall, now worn down to between nothing and 0.85 metres in height and about 1.5 metres across, would originally have formed a more substantial boundary. The wider enclosure, known by the townland name Lisrananoge, or in Irish Lios Ráth na nÓg, sits within a single-bank rath classified in the archaeological record under the Dingle Peninsula survey conducted by J. Cuppage, published in 1986 as part of the Corca Dhuibhne survey. That survey remains one of the more thorough regional inventories of the peninsula, cataloguing the dense concentration of prehistoric and early historic remains for which the Dingle area is known. The three depressions sharing the platform with the hut have not been explained, which gives the site a residual uncertainty that more thoroughly excavated places tend to lose.

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Pete F
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