Hut site, Coimín An Daingin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coimín An Daingin, Co. Kerry

On the southern bank of the Ballyheabought river, in the rough mountain pasture of Coimín An Daingin on the Dingle Peninsula, a small stone structure has endured long enough to still stand nearly two metres high.

That it survives at all is quietly remarkable. Built without mortar, relying entirely on the careful stacking and overlapping of stones, it is an example of corbelled construction, a technique in which each successive course of stone projects slightly inward over the one below until the walls close toward a roof. The result is a rounded, almost beehive-like form, and the one here measures just 3.3 metres across internally, with walls ranging from 85 centimetres to 1.3 metres thick.

What makes this site particularly interesting is not the hut that survives but the one that did not. A lintelled recess in the standing structure, now blocked, appears to have originally opened into a second, conjoined hut to the south-east. That companion structure has long since collapsed, leaving behind only a stone-faced mound with a slight depression at its centre, the tell-tale signature of a once-hollow interior slowly given over to rubble and time. The pairing of huts, connected by a shared threshold, hints at something more than a simple shepherd's shelter, though the precise function and date of the complex remain uncertain. The site was recorded and described by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a detailed regional study of Corca Dhuibhne that catalogued a landscape unusually dense with early remains.

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