Hut site, Com Dhíneol Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the northern side of Com Dhíneol, a hollow in the Dingle Peninsula landscape, a small oval impression in the ground marks where someone once lived, or sheltered, or worked.
The foundation measures just 3.9 by 2.1 metres, barely large enough for a person to lie down and stretch out, and it sits roughly 40 metres south-east of a neighbouring recorded site. It is easy to walk past without a second thought, which is part of what makes it worth pausing over.
Sites like this one are catalogued as hut sites, a catch-all term for the stone or earthen foundations of simple single-roomed structures whose age and purpose can be difficult to determine without excavation. They appear throughout the uplands and coastal margins of western Ireland, left by people who may have been farming, transhumance herding, or simply occupying marginal ground at some point between early prehistory and the post-medieval period. This particular example was recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a landmark study of the Dingle Peninsula that brought systematic attention to the extraordinary density of field monuments along this westward-facing finger of land. The oval plan of the foundation is a detail worth noting; earlier structures on the Irish landscape frequently favoured curved rather than rectilinear forms, though shape alone is rarely enough to date a site with confidence.