Hut site, Baile An Bhúlaeraigh Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the western slopes of the Garfinny valley in Co. Kerry, four drystone structures sit together in rough, scree-littered pastureland.
Three of them are sheep-pens, plainly functional and roughly built. The fourth is something slightly different, and slightly harder to categorise.
This fourth structure may be the remains of a circular hut, a form of dry-laid stone building found across the Dingle Peninsula that predates mortar construction by centuries in some cases, though the precise age of this particular example is uncertain. It measures between five and 5.3 metres in diameter, with surviving walls reaching just under a metre in height. At its southern end, a small sub-circular annex extends outward, roughly 2.3 by 2.4 metres, possibly a storage recess or an additional sheltered space. The whole cluster was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a comprehensive field study of the Dingle Peninsula that catalogued a remarkable density of early structures across this part of Kerry. Whether the hut predates the adjacent pens or was built in the same period and for related purposes, the record does not say. What it does suggest is a small, working landscape where the boundary between habitation and animal husbandry was, at minimum, a matter of a few metres.