Hut site, Baile Mór Thoir, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At the southern foot of Monaree Hill on the Dingle Peninsula, two shallow depressions sit quietly within the interior of an old earthwork enclosure, almost imperceptible now beneath a series of cultivation ridges.
They are easy to overlook, and that is precisely what makes them interesting. These slight hollows are thought to be the remnants of hut sites, the kind of modest domestic structures that once sheltered people within the protection of a rath, and they survive only as faint negatives in the ground.
The enclosure itself is a univallate rath, meaning it is defined by a single bank and ditch, roughly circular in plan. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosure, typically constructed in Ireland between around the fifth and twelfth centuries, used to demarcate a household's territory and protect livestock. This particular example sits at the base of Monaree Hill's southern slopes, looking out over Ballymore village, with its interior noticeably raised above the surrounding ground on the downhill side, a characteristic feature of the terrain rather than deliberate construction. A field wall now divides the interior, and it is to the northeast of that wall that the two shallow depressions remain, tentatively identified as hut sites in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region. The Dingle Peninsula, one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland, contains extraordinary concentrations of early settlement evidence, and even so, features as slight as these tend to slip past casual notice.