Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Two circular stone structures sit in the uplands of Na Gleannta Thuaidh, the northern glens of the Dingle Peninsula, joined together and heavily reworked over time, with a crudely-built sheep-pen tacked onto the northern one as a kind of afterthought.
That combination, ancient habitation structure converted or cannibalised into a practical agricultural enclosure, is part of what makes the site quietly telling. The original builders are long gone, and whoever kept sheep here later clearly had no great reverence for what they were working with.
The two structures are modest in scale: diameters of roughly 3.9 metres and 4 metres, walls standing around 1.3 metres high and about 1.4 metres thick. These proportions are consistent with the corbelled or dry-stone circular huts found across the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula, a landscape extraordinarily dense with early settlement remains. Such huts, sometimes called clocháns, were built without mortar, the stones carefully layered to shed rain and hold their shape over centuries. The site lies approximately 200 metres south of a related recorded monument, suggesting it was not an isolated dwelling but part of a broader pattern of human activity in these hills. It was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a foundational study of one of Ireland's most archaeologically complex regions, though the structures themselves had clearly been altered long before anyone thought to record them formally.