Hut site, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the eastern slopes of Mount Eagle on the Dingle Peninsula, two small stone huts have been absorbed so completely into a field wall that they are easy to miss entirely.
Known as Clochán na gCat, the pair of conjoined structures sit quietly within the landscape, their original form still legible if you know what you are looking for, though the boundary wall that grew around them has made them part of a working agricultural feature rather than a monument held apart from it.
The huts are built in the drystone corbelled technique characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical and vernacular architecture in this part of Kerry. A clochán, as this style of structure is known, is built without mortar; the stones are laid in overlapping courses that gradually close inward to form a beehive-shaped roof, a method that can produce a surprisingly weatherproof interior. The two huts here are roughly circular and joined together, with diameters of approximately 3.15 metres and 3.6 metres. Their surviving heights differ considerably, one standing to around one metre and the other to nearly 1.85 metres, suggesting unequal preservation or later disturbance. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a detailed inventory of the Corca Dhuibhne region that brought many such overlooked structures into the published record for the first time.