Hut site, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

Two ringforts sit within 2.6 metres of each other on a south-facing slope in Derrygorman, on the Dingle Peninsula, which is already unusual enough.

But the southernmost of the pair holds something stranger still inside its banks: a cluster of low, stony mounds that were once read as the ghost outlines of five separate houses, a small settlement compressed into a single enclosure.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically of early medieval date, defined by one or more banks and ditches. This one is univallate, meaning it has a single such bank, and its interior has long prompted debate about what exactly it once contained. The Kerry Archaeological Survey interpreted the stony mounds as the remains of five dwellings, but closer analysis, drawn together in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region of the Dingle Peninsula, concluded that only three of those mounds can reasonably be read as house remains: the two northernmost, which appear to have been joined to one another, and a mound towards the south-east. That eastern hut, measuring roughly 3.6 metres by 3 metres internally, is a modest space by any standard, perhaps comparable in floor area to a large modern bathroom. The south-eastern mound may tell a slightly different story again; it could represent the western wall of a structure that was built directly against the inside of the ringfort's enclosing bank, using it as one of its own walls, a practical economy that was not uncommon in early medieval settlement.

What makes the site particularly worth pausing over is the proximity of the two ringforts to each other. Whether they were occupied simultaneously or at different periods, whether the families or groups who used them were related or simply neighbours, is not recorded. The landscape itself offers no easy answers: the slope is gentle, the views open in all directions, and the mounds are low enough now that the imagination has to do considerable work to reconstruct the small, shared world that once existed here.

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