Hut site, Baile An Bhúlaeraigh Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the steep slopes of Beenduff, on the Dingle Peninsula, a cluster of drystone structures sits in a landscape more accustomed to sheep than to scrutiny.
Most of what survives can be read as animal pens or shelters, the kind of rough enclosures found across upland Ireland wherever people seasonally grazed their herds. But among them are two or three corbelled huts, and it is these that give the site its particular character. Corbelling is a building technique in which stones are laid in overlapping horizontal courses, each projecting slightly inward over the one below, until the rings close at the top without the need for any mortar or timber. The result is a self-supporting stone dome, and on the Dingle Peninsula, where the tradition runs deep, such structures can be extraordinarily durable.
The largest of the huts here is roughly four metres in diameter and stands to about 2.25 metres, with walls between 1.4 and 1.55 metres thick. Four niches are set into the interior walls, a feature sometimes associated with storage or with the placement of lamps or religious objects. The eastern entrance gap appears to be a later alteration rather than the original opening, and a straight wall added to the south has modified what was probably a circular plan. A second, smaller hut abuts the stone plinth that supports the southern side of the first, suggesting the two were used in close relation. A third structure, set uphill and to the south-east, is perhaps the most intriguing of the group. Also circular, it has a lintelled entrance on the south-east side, but also a lintelled opening leading into a subterranean chamber on the north-west. That chamber is rectangular, roughly 2.4 metres by 2 metres and only 0.67 metres high, and is covered by a single large stone slab. This type of underground space is broadly comparable to a souterrain, a man-made underground passage or chamber used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, though the precise date and function of this example remain uncertain. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula.