Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In a field in Na Gleannta Thuaidh, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, the ground dips in five shallow depressions that are easy to overlook entirely.
They are not ruins in any dramatic sense; there are no standing walls, no obvious architecture. But those hollows, some of which still preserve fragments of drystone walling around their edges, are thought to mark the outlines of ancient circular hut-sites, the kind of simple, round dwellings built without mortar that were common across early medieval and prehistoric Ireland.
The identification of the site comes from the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey carried out by J. Cuppage and published in 1986, a systematic effort to document the extraordinary concentration of archaeological remains across the Dingle Peninsula. That peninsula is one of the most densely layered archaeological landscapes in Ireland, and sites like this one sit quietly within it, neither excavated nor fully explained. The presence of drystone walling around the perimeters of some depressions gives the interpretation more weight than earthwork alone might provide, suggesting that whatever once stood here had at least some structural solidity.