Hut site, Baile An Bhúlaeraigh Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the steep south-eastern slopes of Ballysitteragh mountain in County Kerry, a small stone hut sits on a natural terrace as if it had simply grown there.
It is circular, roughly four metres across and just over a metre and a half tall, with walls between one and one and a half metres thick. Two small niches are cut into those walls, the kind of recesses that might once have held a lamp or a few personal objects. The construction method is corbelling, a technique in which flat stones are laid in overlapping rings that gradually close inward to form a self-supporting roof, requiring no mortar and no timber. It is an ancient approach, and on the Dingle Peninsula it appears in structures ranging from early medieval monastic cells to the clocháns scattered across the hillsides above Slea Head.
The hut was recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, a systematic cataloguing of monuments across the Dingle Peninsula that brought together an extraordinary concentration of prehistoric and early Christian remains. Ballysitteragh itself rises above the western end of the peninsula, a landscape that has been continuously shaped by human activity for millennia, and the terrace on which this structure sits would have offered a natural platform on otherwise difficult ground. Whether it served as a seasonal shelter for those working the higher slopes, a hermit's cell, or something else entirely, the notes do not say, and the absence of a clear date leaves it sitting somewhere in a long continuum of vernacular stone building in the area.