Hut site, Ballyandreen, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Ballyandreen, Co. Kerry

On the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a small circular stone hut survives in a remarkably complete state, its domed roof intact and its narrow doorway still standing after what may be centuries of Atlantic weather.

What makes it quietly unusual is not its age alone but its ordinariness: this was almost certainly not a hermit's cell or an early Christian oratory but a working outhouse, a storage or shelter structure attached to the farmhouse beside it, built by someone who simply needed a dry, solid place to keep something.

The structure is a corbelled drystone hut, meaning its roof was formed without mortar by laying successive rings of flat stones, each slightly overlapping the one below, until they met at the top in a self-supporting dome. This is a technique with deep roots in the region; the Dingle Peninsula is scattered with clocháns, the beehive-shaped cells associated with early medieval monastic life, and this hut belongs to that same constructional tradition, even if its purpose was entirely secular. Its dimensions are modest but precise: an internal diameter of 1.5 metres, a height of 1.82 metres, and a lintelled entrance, meaning the doorway is topped with a single horizontal stone, measuring just 0.94 metres high by 0.42 metres wide. You would stoop to enter. The structure was documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne area, the Irish name for the Dingle Peninsula, which remains one of the most thorough records of the region's built heritage.

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Pete F
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