Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

On the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a set of three small structures sits arranged in a north-west to south-east line, connected by a stretch of old field wall.

The alignment itself is quietly suggestive, the kind of deliberate ordering that implies a working landscape rather than a casual scatter of ruins, though whatever daily life once organised itself around these buildings left no written record behind.

One of the three is a circular drystone structure, built without mortar in the ancient tradition of dry-stacked stone construction, measuring 2.8 metres in diameter, 1.5 metres high, with walls 1.3 metres thick. Those proportions matter: walls nearly as thick as the interior is wide speak to a building made to last and to insulate, whether against Atlantic weather or for the storage of something that needed to be kept. The structure sits within a small, irregularly shaped enclosure of roughly 4 by 4 metres, and within that same enclosure are the remains of what may have been a sheep-shelter. The grouping was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark survey of the area around Ballyferriter that documented a landscape unusually dense with early remains. The Irish name Baile An Lochaigh refers to the townland in which these structures stand, part of a western coastline where the Irish language and old land-use patterns have survived longer than almost anywhere else in the country.

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Pete F
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