Hut site, Baile Na Habha, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower western slopes of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, a cluster of low stone mounds represents what may once have been a small settlement of hut-sites attached to a cashel, a type of early Irish stone-walled enclosure typically associated with a farmstead or minor stronghold.
The cashel itself is now reduced to little more than a faint circular outline in the ground, its walls long since collapsed or robbed for other uses.
What makes the site quietly interesting is the second life its structures appear to have led. The hut-sites, if that is indeed what they originally were, were later repurposed as sheep-folds, a common enough fate for ancient stonework in upland pastoral areas. Ordnance Survey maps record these enclosures, but on the ground they amount to little more than low ridges of tumbled stone, with only a few short stretches of outer wall face still holding any shape. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which recorded it under the area then known by its Irish name, reflecting the strong Gaeltacht character of this part of Kerry.