Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Cool, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Corrin mountain in County Kerry, within the enclosure of a univallate rath, a shallow hollow in the ground marks what was almost certainly once a dwelling.

The hollow measures roughly 5.8 metres across, and is edged by a low earthen bank, no more than a metre wide and about half a metre at its highest point. A univallate rath is a type of enclosed farmstead surrounded by a single earthen bank and ditch, common across early medieval Ireland and typically associated with a farming family of modest standing. This particular one looks east over the valley of the Finglas river, the ground inside the enclosure sloping downhill in that direction.

The hut hollow sits in the north-eastern part of the rath interior. The surrounding bank is open to the south and preserves no visible trace of stone wall facing, suggesting the structure was built largely in earth or organic materials rather than drystone, which makes its survival as a readable feature all the more tenuous. The evidence was documented by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, which remains one of the more thorough regional surveys carried out in Ireland in the twentieth century.

What remains at the site is subtle, the kind of feature that reads better to someone who knows what they are looking at than to a casual walker. The slight depression, the low enclosing bank, the open southern aspect; these are easy to miss or dismiss as natural unevenness in the hillside. But taken together, and set within the broader context of the rath that contains it, they suggest a domestic space, a place where someone once lived on a slope above the Finglas valley, with a long view to the east.

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Pete F
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