Hut site, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

A modern road cuts straight through the middle of this early medieval enclosure in Derrygorman, dividing north from south with a matter-of-factness that would have baffled whoever originally built it.

The circular rath, known locally in the Irish as Lios Mór, survives in otherwise well-preserved condition on level ground, which makes the bisection all the more striking. A rath is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or defended residence, and this one retains enough of its original form to reward close attention despite the intrusion of the road.

Within the enclosure, two possible hut-sites have been identified. The first sits near the centre of the western half of the interior and takes the form of a grass-grown band of collapsed stone enclosing a roughly square area of about 5.2 metres across, the kind of low, overgrown rubble that is easy to walk past without registering what it once was. The second lies just north of the western entrance gap and survives only as a roughly circular hollow, now densely overgrown. A trench to the south of the same entrance may be a later field drain rather than anything prehistoric. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that was often used for storage or refuge in early medieval settlements, was recorded here by the Kerry Archaeological Survey but could not be located during subsequent fieldwork. These details were first documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a volume covering the archaeology of Corca Dhuibhne that remains a key reference for the area.

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