Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

Two stone hut foundations sit in rough pastureland near the entrance to Com an Lochaigh, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry.

What makes them quietly odd is that they were originally conjoined, built as a pair sharing a common wall, yet at some later point a field boundary was driven straight through them, separating the two structures and, in the case of the eastern hut, bisecting it entirely from east to west with a second wall. The archaeology of ordinary farming life has, in other words, been overwritten by the archaeology of later ordinary farming life.

The two huts are notably different in scale. The eastern one is modest, roughly 3.2 by 2.5 metres across and surviving to about 0.8 metres in height, with walls approximately 1.75 metres thick, the kind of sturdy but compact proportions common to early stone shelters in this part of Munster. The western hut is considerably larger, around 5.8 metres in diameter and still standing to 1.5 metres, and it preserves something the eastern hut does not: a possible lintelled recess at ground level, nearly a metre wide, a quarter of a metre high, and just over a metre deep. A lintelled recess of this kind, a small niche formed by placing a flat stone across an opening in the wall, may have served for storage, a lamp, or some other domestic purpose, though its precise function here remains a matter of interpretation. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a detailed catalogue of the remarkable concentration of ancient monuments found across this westerly finger of land.

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