Hut site, Corr Áille, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Corr Áille, Co. Kerry

On the steep north-eastern slopes of Reenconnell, on the Dingle Peninsula, a small cluster of early stone structures sits beside the ancient route known as the Saint's Road, the upland path that pilgrims have long taken to reach the summit of Brandon Mountain.

Among them are two clochauns, the Irish term for drystone corbelled huts of a type associated with early Christian monastic and pilgrimage landscapes. One of these huts is remarkably well preserved: its circular corbelled wall, built entirely without mortar, still stands to a height of 1.75 metres and measures seven to eight metres across externally. Hidden within it, behind a lintelled opening in the south-western wall, is the entrance to a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage of the kind often found associated with early medieval settlements, likely used for storage or refuge. The souterrain is now inaccessible, but it can be traced running north-west along the line of the surrounding cashel wall.

The two huts sit just outside a roughly oval stone enclosure that contains its own clochaun, two leachts (low stone platforms associated with commemorative or devotional practice), a cross-slab, and graves. The graves suggest the site was later reused as a calluragh, a burial ground for unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated churchyards, a practice once widespread across Ireland. Whoever built the huts outside the enclosure wall went to some effort to make the sloping ground workable, cutting a rough terrace and facing its eastern edge with dry stone masonry for a length of about eleven metres. The second hut has fared less well; its walls have largely collapsed into low mounds of rubble, though the entrance on the south-east side survives to a height of around 0.4 metres, wide enough to confirm a diameter of at least 3.3 metres internally. The site was recorded in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula.

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