Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern side of Com an Lochaigh, a small hollow on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, two low stone foundations sit in rough pasture, easy to miss and easier still to misread as a natural scatter of field stone.
They are not. What survives is a sub-oval hut foundation, a shape common to early Irish vernacular building, where walls were laid out in a rough oval or rounded rectangle rather than in strict right angles, following the contours of the ground and the logic of available stone. Pressed against its eastern side is a second, adjoining foundation, either a small enclosure or another hut, the distinction now blurred by time and weathering.
The main structure measures roughly three metres by two and a half, with the remaining wall standing to about one metre in height. These are modest dimensions, suggesting a single-roomed shelter rather than any kind of substantial domestic complex. The site lies within the broader landscape of Corca Dhuibhne, the Dingle Peninsula, which is one of the most archaeologically layered stretches of Atlantic Ireland, its hillsides and coastal margins carrying the traces of occupation across several millennia. The hut was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey, a detailed inventory of the peninsula's monuments published by Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne, and it appears there as entry number 1062 among a great many comparable structures recorded across the same terrain.