Hut site, Dunboy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Settlement Sites
About seventy metres from the ruins of O'Sullivan Bere's castle at Dunboy, tucked into a coniferous wood on a north-east-facing slope, sits a small circular hut site that most visitors to this part of the Beara Peninsula would walk straight past without noticing.
It is modest almost to the point of invisibility: a ring of stone wall no more than four metres across, its height varying between thirty centimetres and seventy centimetres, with a narrow entrance just three-quarters of a metre wide opening out to the north-east onto level ground. A coniferous tree has since rooted itself in the interior, and rubble now obscures much of what remains.
The hut itself is the kind of structure, a simple dry-stone enclosure cut into the slope on its uphill side to create a level floor, that appears across Irish landscapes from prehistory through to the early modern period. Without excavation it is difficult to date with confidence, but its proximity to O'Sullivan Bere's castle places it in suggestive company. That castle, on the shore at Dunboy, is best remembered as the site of a brutal siege in 1602, when English forces under George Carew overwhelmed the last defenders holding it for Donal Cam O'Sullivan Bere, an event that effectively ended Gaelic resistance in Munster following the Battle of Kinsale. Whether this small hut predates, accompanies, or postdates that history is unknown, but its position within the same landscape lends it a quiet weight that bare dimensions alone do not convey.

