Hut site, Mám An Óraigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of a spur running east to west from Lateevemore, overlooking Ventry Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula, a small circular foundation sits pressed against the bank of an Early Christian church enclosure.
It measures roughly 3.9 metres across, its southern edge formed by the enclosure bank itself and its northern edge marked by a low stony wall no more than thirty centimetres high. The structure is modest almost to the point of invisibility, yet that very modesty is part of what makes it worth attention.
The site sits adjacent to Kilcolman, known in Irish as Cill na gColmán, an Early Christian church site at which a formal enclosure bank still survives. The small circular foundation abutting it to the south is classified as a hut site, likely the remains of a simple dwelling associated with the ecclesiastical settlement. Such structures were common features of early Irish monastic landscapes, where monks or anchorites would have lived in small cells clustered around a church or oratory. The fact that this one borrows the enclosure bank as part of its own wall suggests it was built in deliberate relationship with the larger complex, perhaps a later addition by someone seeking shelter or seclusion within the familiar boundary of a sacred place. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a foundational study of the extraordinary concentration of early medieval remains along the Corca Dhuibhne coastline.