Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

On the lower northern slopes of Com an Lochaigh, a pair of ancient stone hut foundations has been quietly absorbed into a field wall, the kind of agricultural boundary that farmers have been building and rebuilding across Kerry for generations.

What makes this site worth pausing over is that the absorption was never total. The two circular huts, built using drystone construction, meaning without mortar, with stones carefully selected and stacked to hold each other in place, remain legible beneath and within the later wall.

The two structures are conjoined, sharing a connecting passage between them, a design that suggests they functioned as a unit rather than as separate dwellings built at different times. The larger, south-western hut is the more substantial of the pair, measuring roughly 4.2 metres in diameter and surviving to a height of 1.2 metres in places, with walls around 1.1 metres thick. It has its own independent entrance facing south-west, as well as the internal passage leading to its smaller neighbour. That north-eastern hut is considerably more modest, at 2.1 metres across and just 0.8 metres high, and appears to have had no separate way in or out of its own, making it accessible only through the larger structure. The field wall that bisects the south-western hut is a reminder of how thoroughly later land use can cut across earlier occupation without entirely erasing it. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a detailed regional study covering the Corca Dhuibhne area, and that record remains the primary source for what is known about it.

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