Hut site, Baile An Bhúlaeraigh Theas, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Bhúlaeraigh Theas, Co. Kerry

On the north-western slopes of Knockmoylebeg, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a small cluster of stone structures sits quietly across roughly a hundred metres of hillside.

The group includes sheep-pens and the remains of two huts, and what makes the site quietly compelling is the detail preserved in the smaller of the two: a circular foundation, just over three metres across and standing to about 1.2 metres, with a lintelled entrance and a wall-cupboard still intact. The wall-cupboard, a simple recess built into the thickness of the stonework, is a domestic touch that gives the ruin an unexpectedly human quality. The wall itself varies between 0.8 and 1.35 metres thick, and a sheep-pen butts up against its western side, suggesting the building and the enclosure were part of the same working arrangement.

The second hut is larger, irregularly oval in plan, measuring roughly 4.38 by 3.3 metres, and standing to 1.8 metres. It shows considerable evidence of later rebuilding, which points to a site that was not simply abandoned at one moment but adapted and reused over time, likely by successive generations of farmers or herders working the upland grazing. The whole complex belongs to a tradition of seasonal or semi-permanent upland settlement common across the peninsula, where stone-walled shelters for both people and animals were built and rebuilt as the land demanded. The site was recorded and described by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986, a landmark survey of the Dingle Peninsula that brought systematic attention to hundreds of such vernacular and prehistoric structures across one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland.

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