Hut site, Corr Áille, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Corr Áille, Co. Kerry

On the steep northern slopes of the Reenconnell ridge in County Kerry, two small stone huts have sat through wind and weather for centuries, their corbelled roofs still largely intact.

Corbelling is one of the oldest building techniques known in Ireland, where flat stones are laid in overlapping rings, each course projecting slightly inward over the one below, until the gap closes at the top without the need for mortar or timber. The result is a structure that can outlast almost everything around it, which is precisely why examples like these survive on remote hillsides long after the people who built them have passed from any record.

The two huts sit on either side of a rectangular stone-walled enclosure, roughly 7.8 by 7.4 metres internally, with one hut opening onto the north-east corner and the other onto the south-west. The first is sub-rectangular in plan, measuring about 2.6 by 2.3 metres, and stands to a height of 1.55 metres. The second, roughly oval, is somewhat larger at 3.4 by 3.1 metres and rises to 2.3 metres. The arrangement, two shelters oriented to opposite corners of a shared yard, suggests a working compound rather than anything purely domestic or ceremonial. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a landmark study of the Corca Dhuibhne region that catalogued the remarkable concentration of early monuments along this stretch of the south-west Kerry coast.

The location is genuinely remote. Rough mountain terrain and the gradient of the Reenconnell ridge mean this is not a site one stumbles upon. The huts are small enough that in poor visibility they could easily be missed against the surrounding stonework of the hillside, but the enclosure wall gives the compound a defined shape that rewards a careful eye.

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