Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

In the valley between the western spurs of Brandon Peak and Ballysitteragh mountain on the Dingle Peninsula, a circular enclosure holds an unusual combination of the living and the dead, or rather of dwellings and graves sharing the same walled space.

The interior is almost entirely occupied by burials, yet the foundations of three huts are also traceable within the same boundary, suggesting that this enclosure served more than one purpose across its long history.

The enclosure was used until the nineteenth century as a calluragh, a type of unconsecrated burial ground traditionally reserved for unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial. Such places carry a particular weight in the Irish landscape, quietly set apart from parish life and often located at older, pre-Christian sites. Here, the presence of hut foundations complicates the picture. One of the three structures, abutting the western enclosure wall, is rectangular in plan, measuring approximately five metres east to west and just under three metres north to south internally, with walls surviving to a maximum height of sixty centimetres. Its western end has been lost, and a band of stone collapse within the interior may indicate that an internal dividing wall once subdivided the space. Whether the huts predate the burial use, or whether the enclosure shifted function over time, the remains as they survive do not fully answer. The site was recorded in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a region unusually dense with early remains of this kind.

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