Hut site, Cathair Boilg, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cathair Boilg, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a small stone structure sits close to the ground as though it has been slowly pressing itself into the hillside over centuries.

It is a corbelled drystone hut foundation, circular in plan, roughly 3.8 metres across and still standing to a height of 1.3 metres. Corbelled construction is a technique in which courses of dry, unmortared stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing the roof without the need for timber or mortar. The result is self-supporting and, in the right hands, remarkably durable.

The site sits within the area known as Cathair Boilg, a name that suggests the presence of a cathair, the Irish term for a stone-walled enclosure or small fort. This part of the Dingle Peninsula is extraordinarily dense with early medieval and prehistoric remains. J. Cuppage documented the structure in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the peninsula, a detailed field study that catalogued the remarkable concentration of monuments across this stretch of southwest Kerry. The hut foundation itself is modest in scale but consistent with the kind of seasonal or ancillary structures that cluster around larger enclosures in the area, though its precise date and function have not been firmly established in the available record.

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