Hut site, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

At Com Dhíneol Theas, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a cluster of three small stone structures sits quietly in the landscape, their walls still largely intact despite having been built without mortar.

They are corbelled drystone huts, a construction technique in which courses of flat stones are laid so that each layer slightly overhangs the one below, eventually drawing inward to form a self-supporting roof or dome. The method is ancient and appears elsewhere across the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula, where the concentration of early stone monuments is unusually high even by Irish standards.

The three structures vary slightly in shape and size. The first is circular, roughly two metres in diameter and one metre high, with walls about eighty centimetres thick. Notably, a later sheep-shelter was built within its interior at some point, suggesting the ruin remained visible and useful to farmers long after its original purpose had been forgotten. The second hut is oval, considerably larger at four and a half by two and a half metres, and retains a wall extending a short distance to the south-west that incorporates a small lintelled chamber, just under a metre and a half long and roughly a metre high inside. A lintelled chamber of this kind, roofed with a single flat stone laid across two upright sides, is a simple but effective form of enclosed space that appears in various early Irish contexts, sometimes as storage, sometimes as a more ritual recess. The third hut abuts the north-west side of the second, also oval in plan, at roughly two and a half by two metres. All three are described as possible hut sites, a qualification reflecting the difficulty of dating drystone structures without excavation. The grouping was documented by J. Cuppage in the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986.

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