Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cill Fearnóg, Co. Kerry

On the Dingle Peninsula, in the townland of Cill Fearnóg, there stands a beehive hut described as both perfectly preserved and, perhaps more unexpectedly, modern.

That second word is the puzzle. Beehive huts, known in Irish as clocháns, are corbelled dry-stone structures, built without mortar by laying stones in overlapping rings that gradually close into a domed roof. They are most commonly associated with early medieval monastic life, scattered across the Atlantic fringes of Kerry and Clare as relics of austere religious practice. To find one described as modern rather than ancient quietly disrupts that assumption.

The site at Cill Fearnóg was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula. The survey recorded the structure under entry number 1390. Beyond its location and its state of preservation, the notes offer little elaboration, but the designation of the hut as modern rather than early medieval suggests it was built using the same ancient corbelling technique at a considerably later date, a tradition of vernacular construction that persisted in parts of west Kerry well into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, sometimes for agricultural use, sometimes simply because the method worked.

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