Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

Two small stone rooms, joined together and roofless to the sky, sit in the landscape of Baile An Lochaigh on the Dingle Peninsula, their walls still rising to nearly three metres after what may be many centuries of exposure to Atlantic weather.

What makes them quietly remarkable is the construction method: corbelling, a technique in which each course of drystone is laid so that it projects slightly inward over the one below, allowing the walls to close gradually toward a roof without the use of mortar or timber. The result is a self-supporting shell, robust enough to have survived long after whatever community built and used these huts has gone.

The two huts are roughly circular in plan and share a wall, effectively conjoined into a single structure. The western hut measures approximately 3.1 by 2.8 metres internally, with walls around 1.2 metres thick and a surviving height of 2.75 metres. Three niches are set into its walls, small recessed chambers that might have held lamps, tools, or objects of daily or devotional significance. Structures of this corbelled type are found elsewhere on the Dingle Peninsula and across the west of Ireland, and their function and date have long been debated by archaeologists; they are variously associated with early medieval monastic activity, seasonal shelters, and later pastoral use. The site was recorded and described by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a publication that documented hundreds of sites across this unusually dense archaeological landscape.

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