Hut site, Kilteenbane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the flat ground between Corrin mountain and the Finglas river on the Dingle Peninsula, a rath has been swallowed so completely by vegetation that the souterrain beneath it can no longer be reached at all.
A rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, that once served as a defended farmstead; a souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage associated with such sites, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. At Kilteenbane, the enclosure also preserves traces of three hut sites within its bounds, though the vegetation has made proper examination of any of them extremely difficult.
Researchers recorded in the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey of 1986, compiled by J. Cuppage and published under the title Corca Dhuibhne, noted the site's general layout and the presence of a smaller circular hut to the west-northwest of the main hut remains. By the time the entry was revisited, that smaller structure had been reduced to little more than a loose scatter of stones. The site sits at the eastern edge of a level corridor of land, hemmed in on one side by the rising ground of Corrin mountain and on the other by the course of the Finglas river, a position that would have made reasonable agricultural sense to whoever first enclosed it, even if the enclosure itself is now barely legible from the outside.