Hut site, Dohilla, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Dohilla, Co. Kerry

On the landward end of Reenadrolaun Point in County Kerry, roughly eighty metres northeast of a deep, narrow coastal inlet called Coosnahorna, half a circular stone hut survives in the ground.

Only the southern portion remains, but what is there is instructive: a double slab-lined wall with a stone rubble infill, enclosing an interior space of about 3.2 metres in diameter. That construction method, two parallel faces of upright or flat-set slabs with the gap between them packed with smaller stones, was a practical way of achieving a solid, insulating wall without the need for mortar, and it appears at various prehistoric and early medieval sites across Ireland's Atlantic coastline.

The hut does not sit in isolation. It occurs within the traces of an old field system, which suggests it was once part of a small agricultural settlement, a cluster of enclosures, boundaries, and perhaps other structures that have since been reduced by time, weather, and the slow reuse of stone. The Iveragh Peninsula, of which this corner of Kerry forms a part, is unusually dense with this kind of remains, its relative remoteness having slowed the kind of large-scale land clearance and development that erased comparable sites elsewhere. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, who compiled an archaeological survey of South Kerry published by Cork University Press in 1996, recorded this site among hundreds of others across the peninsula, mapping a landscape that had accumulated human activity across many centuries.

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