Hut site, Cathair Deargáin Theas, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cathair Deargáin Theas, Co. Kerry

What is most striking about Cathair Deargáin Theas is not the ringfort itself, though it commands a fine outlook across the northern face of the western Dingle Peninsula, but rather what is packed inside it.

At least seven hut structures, in varying states of survival, are distributed around the interior of this univallate rath, a ringfort enclosed by a single bank and ditch. That density of occupation within a single enclosure gives the site an unusual quality, as though the boundary bank was less a defensive perimeter than a shared wall for a small, organised community living in close quarters on the gentle north-western slopes of Reenconnell.

The huts were first documented systematically by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, and what the survey reveals is a settlement whose details are frustratingly partial but genuinely legible in places. One hut, identified at the north-western entrance gap, appears to have been sliced through when the gap was cut, suggesting it predates, or at least complicates, the layout we now see. Its internal dimensions are estimated at roughly 3.9 metres by 3.5 metres. A second hut, built directly against the ringfort bank at the south-east, measured about 4.2 metres in diameter internally, though only the lower south-eastern arc of its wall, standing around half a metre high, still holds its shape. Two further huts to the east were probably conjoined, a pair of rooms sharing a wall, though their condition made precise measurement impossible. The largest identified structure, sitting in the southern sector of the enclosure, measured 6.4 by 6 metres internally; its floor is set below the surrounding ground level, and its walls have collapsed inward into a low rubble mound, with just a short run of outer facing still visible. Beyond these, the survey noted vague traces of further possible huts, and a dense scatter of stone that may indicate yet another, bringing the potential total to seven or more.

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