Hut site, Cill Chúile, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower north-western slopes of the Reenconnell ridge in County Kerry, a large circular structure sits so thoroughly absorbed into the local field boundary system that a passing walker might take it for nothing more than a particularly solid stretch of old wall.
It is, in fact, a corbelled drystone hut, built using a technique in which courses of flat stones are laid in overlapping rings, each slightly inward of the last, until they close at the top without any mortar holding them together. The structure measures six metres in diameter, stands 1.4 metres high, and has walls 1.5 metres thick, dimensions that suggest something more substantial than a simple animal shelter. It has probably been partly rebuilt over the centuries, its fabric quietly cannibalised and rearranged by generations of farmers working the same ground.
What makes the site stranger still is what surrounds it. About two metres to the east sits a much lower circular foundation, only 35 centimetres high and between roughly four and four and a half metres across, and beside it stands a small holed stone. Holed stones appear across early Irish sites in a variety of contexts, sometimes associated with ritual, sometimes with more practical uses such as tethering or boundary marking, and their presence is rarely straightforward to interpret. A further 31 metres to the east, a portion of yet another circular foundation survives. The clustering of these features across a relatively short stretch of hillside points to a settlement of some kind rather than a single isolated structure. The site sits within the Corca Dhuibhne region of the Dingle Peninsula, an area extraordinarily dense with early medieval and prehistoric remains, and was recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of that landscape.