Hut site, Gleann Seanchoirp, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gleann Seanchoirp, Co. Kerry

In a remote glen on the Dingle Peninsula, close to the upper reaches of the Owenmore river, two low stone foundations sit roughly eight metres apart in the landscape.

One is oval, the other circular, and together they represent what surveyors cautiously describe as a possible hut site. That uncertainty is part of what makes the place worth considering: these are not the grand ecclesiastical remains or promontory forts that draw most attention on the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula, but something quieter and more ambiguous, the remnants of a domestic or sheltering presence in an area whose Irish name, Gleann Seanchoirp, carries its own atmospheric weight.

The two structures, modest in scale, measure roughly four by three metres and two and three-quarter metres across respectively, with surviving wall heights of around three-quarters of a metre and wall thickness of approximately eighty-five centimetres. That thickness relative to the height suggests substantial, carefully built walls, the kind of construction associated with early medieval or early historic settlement rather than casual field enclosures. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey, a landmark study of the Dingle Peninsula that catalogued hundreds of monuments across one of the most archaeologically dense regions in Ireland. Cuppage recorded the huts as lying ten to fifteen metres west of the river, placing them in a position that would have offered both fresh water and some shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather.

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