Hut site, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

Two ringforts sitting less than three metres apart is unusual enough, but what makes the southern of this pair at Derrygorman quietly puzzling is the cluster of low stony mounds inside it, which have generated some disagreement about what, exactly, was once built here.

Early interpretation counted as many as five houses within the enclosure. More cautious analysis, drawing on J. Cuppage's 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, suggests only three of those mounds are plausibly the remains of domestic structures. The easternmost of the credible huts measures just 3.6 metres by 3 metres internally, a space barely large enough to stand in comfortably, let alone live in year-round.

The site is a univallate rath, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by a single earthen bank and ditch, the standard form of early medieval farmstead across Ireland. This one sits on a gentle south-facing slope with wide views in all directions, the kind of position that would have served lookout and livestock management alike. Its companion rath lies only 2.6 metres to the north, and the two northernmost hut mounds within the southern enclosure appear to have been conjoined, sharing a wall or running directly into one another. There is also a low mound along the south-east of the interior that may represent the western wall of a house that once pressed right up against the ringfort's own bank, using the enclosure boundary as part of its structure. Cuppage's survey, published under the title Corca Dhuibhne, remains the foundational record for this stretch of the Dingle Peninsula, cataloguing a landscape extraordinarily dense with early settlement remains.

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