Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry

Two small stone rooms, joined at the wall and still largely intact, sit in rough pastureland on the northern side of the Ballyheabought river valley in the Dingle Peninsula.

They are clocháns, a type of beehive-shaped hut built using corbelling, a technique in which each course of dry-laid stone projects slightly inward over the one below until the courses meet at the top, creating a self-supporting dome without mortar. What makes this particular pair quietly remarkable is the detail of their arrangement: two circular chambers of noticeably different sizes, connected by a lintelled passage, each with its own entrance and a single niche set into the interior wall.

The measurements recorded here are modest. The smaller hut has an internal diameter of around 2.1 metres; the larger reaches 3.4 metres across. Both stand to roughly 1.5 metres in height, with walls between one and one and a half metres thick depending on which structure you measure. That thickness is not incidental; it is what allows the corbelled roof to bear its own weight across centuries of Atlantic weather. The communicating passage between the two chambers, finished with a lintel stone laid flat across the opening, suggests the pair functioned as a unit rather than as two independent shelters. The broader group of clocháns on the same hillside, of which this pair forms a part, was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne. The Corca Dhuibhne region has one of the densest concentrations of early medieval stone architecture in Ireland, and sites like this one represent a vernacular building tradition whose roots extend back well over a thousand years.

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