Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry

On the steep, rocky northern slopes of Com an Lochaigh in County Kerry, a small patch of level ground holds two circular stone huts sitting close together.

What makes the eastern hut particularly notable is its construction method: corbelling, a technique by which stones are laid in gradually overlapping courses until they meet at the top, creating a self-supporting dome without mortar or timber. The entrance is lintelled, just under a metre high and fractionally less than that in width, sized to admit a person while retaining as much warmth as possible inside.

The eastern hut, recorded as KE034-084, measures roughly 2.4 metres in internal diameter and stands to a height of 2 metres, with walls nearly 1.3 metres thick. Those proportions, walls almost as massive as the interior is wide, speak to the demands of the Atlantic climate on the Dingle Peninsula, where wind and rain press hard against anything exposed on a hillside. To the south-west, the outline of an adjoining enclosure, a walled area that would have defined a small farmstead or working compound, can still be traced on the ground. The site was surveyed and documented by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, which catalogued the extraordinary concentration of early structures across this part of west Kerry.

The huts sit within a landscape that rewards careful looking. The corbelled form places them in a tradition of early Irish drystone building, a tradition whose most elaborate examples are found not far away on sites such as those scattered across the broader Dingle uplands. The enclosure outline at the south-west is the kind of detail easily missed underfoot, more legible in low winter light when shadows deepen the slight ridges left by collapsed or robbed-out walls.

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