Hut site, Caherpierce, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of Mullaghmore mountain, in a stretch of rough wet pasture at Caherpierce in County Kerry, a ring of stones sits almost flush with the ground.
It is barely a single course high, measuring 3.6 metres across with walls roughly 1.65 metres thick, and easy to overlook entirely if you do not know what you are looking at. What it represents is the ghost of a circular hut, a foundation so reduced by time and weather that only its outline survives, tracing the footprint of a structure whose occupants and precise age remain unrecorded.
Circular stone hut foundations of this kind are scattered across the Dingle Peninsula, which carries one of the densest concentrations of early medieval field monuments in Ireland. The peninsula's relative isolation, combined with the durability of its local stone, has preserved traces of settlement that elsewhere were long ago ploughed away or built over. This particular site was recorded as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a landmark piece of fieldwork that catalogued hundreds of monuments across the area. The wall thickness here, at nearly 1.65 metres, is notable for a structure of such modest diameter; it suggests a solidity of construction that was not merely functional but perhaps intended to resist the considerable exposure of a mountain slope facing into Atlantic weather.