Hut site, Baile Uí Chorráin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At the edge of a flat boggy plain on the Dingle Peninsula, at the point where the lower reaches of the Feohanagh river drain into the surrounding landscape, a pair of ancient huts sit so quietly reduced that most walkers would pass them without a second glance.
Their walls have long since collapsed into grass-grown banks, now only about half a metre high, and what you are looking at are the ghostly outlines of two conjoined, oval to circular structures. The larger of the two measures roughly 6 by 5 metres internally; the smaller, 5.5 by 3 metres. A third possible hut lies to the south-east, roughly triangular in outline and about 4 by 4 metres inside, adding a slightly irregular footnote to an already unusual grouping.
What makes the site quietly remarkable is what lies beneath the larger, western hut: a souterrain, the underground stone-lined passage that early medieval communities built for storage, refuge, or both, running 4.5 metres in length, 0.6 metres wide, and about a metre high. The roofing slabs are gone now, leaving the passage open to the sky, but the dimensions alone give a sense of how enclosed and deliberate the original construction was. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a region whose density of early settlement remains is almost unparalleled in Ireland. The relationship between the conjoined huts and the souterrain below suggests a settlement where above-ground domestic life and concealed underground space were planned together, a pattern found at a number of early medieval sites across the country but always worth pausing over when you encounter it in situ.