Hut site, Baile Na Habha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile Na Habha, Co. Kerry

Two circular stone huts joined together and connected by a communicating passage sit on the southern bank of a small river on the western flank of the Brandon mountain range in County Kerry.

What makes this site quietly unusual is not simply its age or its setting, but its configuration: two dry-stone structures built to work as a pair, with a shared internal passage linking them, suggesting an arrangement designed for practical daily use rather than occasional shelter.

The western hut survives to a height of 1.8 metres, with walls roughly 1.7 metres thick, and measures four metres in diameter internally. Stone huts of this type, sometimes called clocháns, were built without mortar, relying entirely on the careful corbelling or stacking of stone. What sets this particular example apart is a small lintelled wall niche in the western hut, a deliberate recess formed by laying a flat stone across two upright ones, most likely used for storing a lamp, a vessel, or some small object of daily life. The detail is minor in scale but telling in what it implies about the people who used the space. The site was recorded as part of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published in 1986 by J. Cuppage under the project title Corca Dhuibhne, a comprehensive effort to document the remarkable concentration of early remains across this part of the Dingle Peninsula.

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