Hut site, Killeenagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Killeenagh, Co. Kerry

In the rough wet pastureland of Killeenagh, on the Dingle Peninsula, there is a hollow in the ground that was once, most likely, someone's home.

It is not dramatic. It rises barely a metre above the surrounding field and measures only about five metres across. But the drystone lining of its walls, and the careful way it was excavated into the centre of a natural mound, suggest a deliberate and considered act of construction rather than any casual earthwork.

The site sits within what appears to be an old field system, which places it in a broader landscape of human activity whose age is hard to pin down precisely. Drystone construction, in which stones are laid without mortar, is a technique with a very long history in the west of Ireland, and on the Dingle Peninsula in particular it persists from prehistoric times through the early medieval period and beyond. What makes this enclosure particularly curious is a rectangular pit set against the western interior wall, measuring roughly 1.4 by 1.5 metres and sinking about half a metre into the ground. Its purpose is not recorded. It could have served as a storage space, a sleeping hollow, or something else entirely. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a systematic effort to record the extraordinary concentration of monuments on Corca Dhuibhne, the westernmost finger of Kerry reaching into the Atlantic.

The site lies in working farmland and the ground underfoot is described as rough and wet, which gives some sense of the conditions under which whoever built this hollow once lived. The old field boundaries that surround it are themselves a kind of ghost landscape, the outlines of an agricultural world that functioned long before the present one.

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Pete F
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