Hut site, Coimín An Daingin, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Coimín An Daingin, Co. Kerry

Two small circular structures sit on the western slopes of Ballysitteragh, part of the Beennabrack mountain mass on the Dingle Peninsula, built close enough together to share a wall yet deliberately kept separate from one another.

What makes them quietly puzzling is that detail of separation: the two huts are conjoined, but there is no communicating passage between them. Whoever used these spaces moved between them from the outside, not through any internal doorway. Add to that a pair of low lintelled openings set into the northern walls, sized not for people but for small animals, and you have a structure that raises more questions than it answers.

The huts are built in drystone, a technique that requires no mortar, relying instead on the careful layering and wedging of stone to create a stable structure. The larger of the two measures 3.14 metres in diameter and stands to a height of 1.19 metres; the smaller reaches 2.47 metres across and 0.97 metres high. Both have their main entrances facing south. Structures of this kind are scattered across the Dingle Peninsula, which preserves one of the densest concentrations of early field monuments in Ireland, and the area around Coimín An Daingin falls within the territory historically known as Corca Dhuibhne. The site was recorded as part of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, a systematic effort to document the remarkable accumulation of prehistoric and early medieval remains across this corner of Kerry. The precise date of the huts is not established, but their form is consistent with early agricultural activity in the upland zones, where transhumance, the seasonal movement of people and livestock to higher pastures, was practised for centuries.

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