Hut site, Baile An Bhúlaeraigh Theas, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the steep slopes of Knockmoylebeg, in the townland known in Irish as Baile An Bhúlaeraigh Theas, there sits a small circular structure that has outlasted almost everything built around it.
It is a corbelled drystone hut, meaning its walls were constructed without mortar, with flat stones laid so that each course projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing into a rough dome or roof. The technique is ancient and demands considerable skill; when done well, the result can endure for centuries without any binding material at all. This one survives to a height of 1.7 metres, with walls nearly two metres thick and an internal diameter of just over three metres, dimensions that suggest a space intended for a single person or small group to shelter rather than live in any permanent sense.
The site, recorded under the local place-name Neóin-í-áille, also preserves a slight trace of a smaller corbelled structure butting up against the main hut, as well as an external plinth running along the downslope side, likely there to stabilise the foundation on the incline. It appears in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the Dingle Peninsula, which remains one of the most thorough inventories of the area's extraordinary concentration of early stone remains. The peninsula has long been recognised as unusually rich in this kind of evidence, partly because its remoteness discouraged later development, and partly because the local tradition of building in stone, rather than timber, left behind structures that simply did not rot away.