Hut site, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

On the slopes above Com Dhíneol Theas, in the far west of the Dingle Peninsula, there is a large circular hut that nobody can see.

It has not collapsed or been demolished; it simply disappeared beneath the accumulated rubble of generations of field clearance, the slow burial that comes when farmers pile unwanted stone along the edges of their land and the landscape quietly swallows what came before.

The structure is a corbelled hut, a type of dry-stone building in which courses of stone are laid so that each one projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing to form a roof without mortar or timber. Examples of this ancient technique survive across the Dingle Peninsula, where they are sometimes called clocháns, and the finest of them have endured for many centuries. This particular example was recorded by R. A. S. Macalister in 1899, who described it as large and circular. That record remains the primary account of what the hut actually looked like, because by the time the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey was published in 1986, field clearance debris had already rendered it completely concealed. Whether the structure beneath is intact, partially collapsed, or reduced to its foundations is now unknown from the surface.

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