Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Tucked into the junction of two old field walls on the Dingle Peninsula, this small drystone structure sits quietly in the landscape of Baile An Lochaigh, its entrance now blocked, its interior dimensions modest enough that a tall adult would have to stoop considerably to pass through.
The foundation is sub-circular, a shape common to early Irish stone buildings where the walls were built without mortar, each stone carefully selected and placed to hold its neighbours in position through weight and friction alone. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is not its size but its layered history: there is clear evidence of secondary rebuilding, meaning someone returned to this structure at some point after its original construction and modified or repaired it, suggesting it remained in use, or at least in mind, across more than one period of occupation.
The structure was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark regional study of one of Ireland's most archaeologically dense landscapes. The surviving walls stand to a height of 1.3 metres, with the interior measuring roughly 3.9 metres across. A lintelled entrance, where a horizontal stone spans the top of the doorway opening, measures 0.7 metres wide and 0.9 metres high. Two possible wall niches were identified inside, the kind of small recesses built into the thickness of a drystone wall that might have held a lamp, a vessel, or a simple shelf. Outside the main structure, the outline of a small subsidiary chamber is visible in the collapsed material, measuring approximately 1.5 by 1.25 metres with a surviving height of just half a metre. Whether this was a storage annexe, a later addition, or something more specific in function is not recorded, but its presence adds a degree of complexity to what might otherwise seem a straightforward single-cell building.