Hut site, Kilteenbane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Near the head of Glenfais on the Dingle Peninsula, a low grass-grown bank curving through rough pastureland is all that announces a settlement once organised enough to include not just a defended enclosure but a hidden underground passage and at least two small domestic structures.
The site sits on an east-north-east facing slope at Kilteenbane, part of a cluster of early medieval remains in the Corca Dhuibhne landscape, and its quiet, half-buried quality makes it easy to walk past without quite registering what you are seeing.
The enclosure itself is a univallate rath, meaning a ringfort defined by a single surrounding bank and ditch, a form common across early medieval Ireland and typically associated with a farmstead of some status. Within it, two hut foundations survive. The second of these, of indeterminate shape, is pressed directly against the inner face of the ringfort bank just south of the entrance, measuring roughly 3.75 metres by 2 to 3 metres internally. Its walls survive only as a low, stony, turf-covered bank. Alongside these domestic traces, the site contains a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber built from stone, usually thought to have served for storage or as a refuge. The combination of a souterrain with two hut foundations within a single enclosure gives the site a layered domestic complexity that goes well beyond the bare earthwork visible on the surface. The details were recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a landmark inventory of the Corca Dhuibhne region.