Hut site, Baile Na Habha, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower western slopes of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, two small stone huts sit joined together as though leaning into one another for warmth.
They are built in corbelled drystone construction, a technique in which stones are layered so that each course projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing into a roof without the use of mortar. The result is a self-supporting structure that has endured on this exposed hillside for centuries, partly absorbed now into a modern field wall that overlies the outer face of the northwest hut.
The northwest hut is the better documented of the pair. It measures roughly 4.5 metres in diameter and survives to a height of 0.9 metres. Inside, a lintelled niche is set into the wall at the southwest, the kind of recess that might once have served as a small shelf or storage hollow. A possible entrance survives at the north-northeast, marked by a single low upright slab. Beneath and beyond the structure, something more complex once existed. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, is said to have extended westward from the site toward a rectangular foundation visible in the adjacent field. Local knowledge recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula confirms it was there; it is no longer visible today. Whether it was deliberately infilled or simply collapsed and silted over is not recorded.
The site sits within a landscape already dense with early remains. The Dingle Peninsula, or Corca Dhuibhne, contains one of the highest concentrations of early Christian and prehistoric monuments in Ireland, and structures of this type on the Brandon massif are often associated with seasonal habitation or monastic activity connected to the mountain's long pilgrimage tradition. The huts at Baile na hAbha do not announce themselves; they sit quietly within a working agricultural landscape, one wall borrowed by a field boundary, their underground extension gone.