Hut site, Cloichearaí, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cloichearaí, Co. Kerry

On the scree-covered northern slopes of Slievanea, looking out over the Owenmore valley, a small stone structure sits in the kind of spot that discourages casual visitors.

It is irregularly shaped, corbelled, and just two metres high, its walls roughly a metre and a third thick. Corbelling is an ancient building technique in which each successive course of stone projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing into a roof without the need for mortar or timber. The result is a self-supporting dome, and structures built this way on the Dingle Peninsula have survived for centuries, sometimes millennia, largely because there is so little to rot or fail.

The hut at Cloichearaí measures between 2.47 and 2.51 metres in diameter, figures that convey just how compact the interior would have been. Spaces like this were not domestic in any comfortable sense; they served shepherds, pilgrims, or ascetics, people who needed shelter rather than comfort, and who understood the mountain well enough to build from what it offered. The Dingle Peninsula is dense with such structures, and the 1986 archaeological survey of Corca Dhuibhne, compiled by J. Cuppage and published by Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne, catalogued this one among hundreds of early remains scattered across the same landscape. The scree on the slope around it is not incidental; it is the same raw material, loose fractured stone, that would have supplied the builder's hand.

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Pete F
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