Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the steep western slopes of Ballysitteragh mountain in County Kerry, a small stone hut sits on a rocky terrace, largely intact after what may be many centuries.
What makes it quietly odd is not simply its age but the layers of practical reuse that have accumulated around it. A later field wall now cuts straight through the middle of the structure, and an oval animal shelter has been built along the line of its southern wall, so that the original hut and the later additions have become tangled into a single, improvised complex.
The structure is a clochan, the Irish term for a circular dry-stone hut built using the corbelling technique, in which each course of stones projects slightly inward over the one below until the courses meet at the top, forming a self-supporting beehive dome without mortar. This one measures roughly 3.4 metres in diameter and stands about 2 metres high. Its entrance faces south-south-east and opens into a small enclosure. The second edition of the Ordnance Survey map records two conjoined clochans here, but only one survives today. The site is documented in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage under the auspices of Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne, the heritage organisation for the Corca Dhuibhne region, which remains one of the foundational references for early settlement on the peninsula.
The entrance at the south-south-east and the position on a sheltered terrace suggest a structure built with some care for orientation and exposure, typical of the scattered hut sites found across the higher ground of the Dingle Peninsula. The gradual incorporation of the clochan into later agricultural use, first bisected by a field wall, then flanked by an animal shelter, is a pattern seen elsewhere on the peninsula, where early structures were neither demolished nor preserved but simply absorbed into whatever the land needed next.