Hut site, Gleann Seanchoirp, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gleann Seanchoirp, Co. Kerry

In a valley on the Dingle Peninsula whose Irish name, Gleann Seanchoirp, translates roughly as the glen of the old body, a cluster of drystone structures sits among rough, rocky ground.

Drystone construction uses no mortar; stones are carefully selected and stacked so that their own weight and interlocking shapes hold the wall together. What makes this particular group of remains quietly arresting is not any single feature but the combination of setting and survival: the structures occupy what appears to have been a functioning field system, suggesting that people did not merely pass through this landscape but organised and worked it over a sustained period.

Among the structures recorded here is a pair of conjoined circular huts, set about six metres to the north of another feature within the same complex. The two huts are small, one measuring roughly two and a half metres in diameter and the other around four metres, with surviving wall height of approximately one metre. Both are very poorly preserved, their forms only just legible in the terrain. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a detailed regional study that catalogued the extraordinary density of early remains across this part of County Kerry. No precise date has been assigned to the huts, which is not unusual for drystone structures of this kind; without excavation, such features are difficult to place in any specific period.

The notes give very little by way of visitor access or approach, and the terrain is described as rough and rocky, which in this part of Kerry tends to mean precisely that.

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Pete F
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