Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the south-western slopes of Ballysitteragh and Beennabrack mountain in County Kerry, two circular stone huts once stood as recognisable structures.
Today they survive only as low, rounded mounds of tumbled stone, each rising no more than half a metre to just under a metre above the ground. The Ordnance Survey maps still mark them as clocháns, the term for the dry-stone beehive huts traditionally associated with early Christian hermits, monks, and farmers across the Dingle Peninsula, but what the maps show and what the ground now offers are rather different things.
Clocháns were built without mortar, the corbelled stonework carefully laid so that each course of stones overlapped inward until the walls met at the top. They are found in considerable numbers across Corca Dhuibhne, the broader territory encompassing the Dingle Peninsula, where the density of early medieval and prehistoric settlement remains remarkable. The two examples at Baile Uí Shé were documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the peninsula, which catalogued the area's extraordinary concentration of ancient sites. By the time that record was made, the huts had already collapsed into the spread of rubble that remains today, their original form legible mainly through their circular footprints and the moss-covered scatter of unmortared stone.