Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

On a small finger of land pushing southward into Dingle Bay, a cluster of ancient hut sites sits quietly within the earthworks of a promontory fort, a type of enclosure in which a headland or coastal spur is cut off by one or more banks and ditches, using the sea itself as a natural defence on the remaining sides.

Three of these structures occupy the western edge of the promontory, and what makes them quietly arresting is their specificity: two of the northernmost huts survive with enough definition to be measured, their oval outlines running to roughly 5.7 by 2.1 metres and 5.2 by 1.8 metres internally, each with an entrance gap placed at the centre of its eastern wall. They sit detached both from one another and from the enclosing bank nearby, as though arranged with deliberate care rather than accumulated over time.

The site is recorded under the local townland name Monacarroge, or in Irish Móin na Caróige, after the adjacent field, a naming convention noted by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in 1910. Westropp was a prolific recorder of Irish earthworks and coastal monuments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his mention of the site by field name rather than any formal designation reflects the informal way much of this landscape was catalogued before systematic survey work began. The fuller description of the huts and their dimensions comes from the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986 under the title Corca Dhuibhne, a landmark regional study that brought together a remarkable density of prehistoric and early medieval remains from one of the most archaeologically layered peninsulas in Ireland.

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