Hut site, Na Gleannta Thuaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At the head of Com Amhais, in the rough mountain terrain of the Dingle Peninsula, there is a stone hut so small that anyone wishing to enter must crouch to less than knee height.
The lintelled entrance measures just 0.65 metres tall, a gap more suited to crawling than walking, and the interior offers little more room than a modest garden shed. Yet the structure itself is carefully made. Built from corbelled drystone, a technique in which flat stones are laid in overlapping rings that gradually close to form a roof without any mortar, it rises to 2.5 metres and its walls are 1.25 metres thick, giving it a solidity that has outlasted whatever agricultural world it once served.
The hut sits at the north-eastern corner of a large, roughly triangular enclosure whose walls have now almost entirely dissolved back into the hillside. Other structures once stood against the enclosure wall, and these are thought to have functioned as sheep-shelters or folds, suggesting this high, exposed ground was used at some point for pastoral farming, most likely as a seasonal grazing area. The two recesses built into the interior walls are an unusual detail; one of them may originally have served as a window, though the distinction between a window and a storage niche in a structure this compact is perhaps a fine one. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a thorough inventory of a landscape that contains an extraordinary density of early remains. Na Gleannta Thuaidh, the northern glens, is a quietly complex area, and this hut is one of many features that reward careful attention to what at first appears to be empty mountain ground.