Hut site, Com An Bhúlaeraigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Com An Bhúlaeraigh, Co. Kerry

Two stone huts sit side by side on a narrow terrace cut into the steep eastern face of Ballysitteragh mountain in Kerry, sharing a wall but not a doorway.

That detail, two roughly circular structures built together yet without any internal passage between them, gives the site a quietly puzzling quality. Each entrance faces south-east, and the walls, built in the drystone technique of carefully stacked unmortared stone, still stand to around 1.75 metres. The larger of the pair measures roughly 5.7 by 4.95 metres across; the smaller runs to about 4.8 metres in diameter. The walls themselves are between 1.55 and 1.74 metres thick, which speaks to the effort involved and to the need for shelter against whatever weather rolls in off the Atlantic.

The huts occupy the eastern edge of a small field that has long since gone out of use, and the whole complex sits within the townland of Com An Bhúlaeraigh on the Dingle Peninsula, part of the Corca Dhuibhne landscape that has been inhabited, farmed, and crossed by people for millennia. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey, a landmark piece of fieldwork that documented the extraordinary concentration of early and prehistoric remains across this part of west Kerry. Whether the huts served as seasonal shelters for those working upland grazing land, or had some other function, the record does not say. The rugged slope they occupy, rocky and exposed, suggests a working rather than a domestic purpose, but certainty is hard to come by with structures of this kind.

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Pete F
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