Hut site, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a steep slope of rough mountain pasture above the lower Milltown river valley, with Dingle Harbour visible below, there is a circular drystone hut whose walls are nearly as thick as a person is tall.
Built using the corbelling technique, where stones are layered inward and upward without mortar until they meet at the top, the structure has an internal diameter of 5.25 metres but walls ranging from 1.8 to 2.2 metres wide and standing up to 2.05 metres high. That is an unusual ratio, one that suggests the builders were as concerned with permanence and insulation as with interior space. Set into the north-western wall is a small lintelled chamber, just 1.8 metres long, 72 centimetres wide, and 1.45 metres high, the kind of recess that might have served for storage, sleeping, or keeping something out of the cold.
Something stranger lies beneath. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind used throughout early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, was recorded within the hut, though its entrance is no longer visible at the surface. Outside the hut to the north-west, however, a roofing slab breaks the ground, and a probe inserted into the gap below it extended roughly two metres before meeting resistance. The underground space is still there; it has simply been sealed by time and collapse. The hut's surroundings have their own complexity: two modern walls run westward from the structure, forming an irregular approach passage to the entrance at the south-west, and one of those walls continues for around 12 metres before incorporating the northern wall of a sub-rectangular structure measuring approximately 3.3 by 4.6 metres internally, its slightly corbelled wall still standing to 1.4 metres. The whole arrangement, hut, hidden passage, and attendant enclosure, was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey of Corca Dhuibhne.