Hut site, Inis Tuaisceart, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Inis Tuaisceart, Co. Kerry

On the southernmost accessible ground of Inis Tuaisceart, a small circular stone hut sits partly sunk into the earth, its floor a full 1.5 metres below the surrounding surface.

To enter, a person would have had to stoop through a lintelled doorway less than a metre wide and just over a metre high, passing along a passage nearly two metres in length before stepping down into a sunken courtyard and, from there, into the hut itself. The corbelled walls, between 1.5 and 3.3 metres thick, curve inward and are finished with three flat roof slabs. It is a remarkably self-contained structure, engineered to be low in the ground and narrow at the entrance, qualities that suggest both thermal practicality and, perhaps, deliberate enclosure.

Inishtooskert is the northernmost of the Blasket islands, lying roughly four miles off the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula and about two and a half miles north of the Great Blasket. The island covers 241 acres of rocky, thin-soiled ground bounded entirely by sea-cliffs, rising from around 30 metres on its south-eastern edge to a maximum of 175 metres near the north-west. The northern half of the island shows no trace of human settlement at all. The southern half, however, contains a small field system, and within it the remains of an Early Christian monastic settlement associated with St. Brendan. Corbelling, the technique used here, involves laying successive courses of stone so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing into a roof without the need for mortar or timber; it is a method with deep roots in early Irish ecclesiastical architecture, seen most dramatically on Skellig Michael to the south. The hut on Inis Tuaisceart, circular and measuring four metres across internally with an internal height of nearly three metres, belongs to that same tradition. Steps that may once have eased the descent into the sunken courtyard are now obscured by collapse.

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Pete F
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