Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the western slopes of Ballysitteragh mountain in Co. Kerry, a low ring of earthwork encloses what is left of an early Irish settlement.
The enclosure is a univallate ringfort, meaning it has a single surrounding bank or wall, a form that was used across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards as a defended farmstead. Inside it, two structures survive in varying states of ruin: a small circular hut and a souterrain, the latter being an underground stone-lined passage, typically used for storage or as a refuge. Together they suggest a once-inhabited place that has been quietly dissolving back into the rough pastureland around it for a very long time.
The hut sits in the eastern sector of the ringfort's interior. It is modest in scale, around four metres in diameter, and its drystone wall has largely collapsed, surviving now to no more than about a metre at its highest point. The souterrain's full extent is uncertain, its underground course too degraded or unexcavated to trace completely. The site was recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published under the title 'Corca Dhuibhne', a substantial regional survey that documented the extraordinary concentration of prehistoric and early medieval remains across this part of west Kerry. Na Gleannta Thuaidh, the area in which the site lies, sits within that same densely layered landscape, where field monuments of many different periods exist in close proximity on ground that has never been heavily developed.