Hut site, Rinn Chonaill, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Rinn Chonaill, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Reenconnell, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, an irregular enclosure defined by old field walls contains what appears to be a small cluster of ancient dwellings.

The enclosure measures roughly 33 by 38 metres and holds four structures, three of which are thought to be hut sites and one possibly a sheep-pen. What makes the grouping quietly interesting is not its grandeur but its domesticity: this looks like the remains of a working settlement, modest in scale, pressed into a hillside.

The best-preserved of the three probable huts sits in the north-west corner of the enclosure. It is a circular drystone structure, built without mortar in the traditional method of laying stones so they support one another through weight and careful placement, with a diameter ranging between roughly five and just under six metres, and surviving walls reaching about a metre in height. In the eastern side of that wall, a hollow has been identified that appears to be partly lintelled and stone-lined, suggesting either a wall-passage or a small internal chamber. Such features appear in other early Irish stone structures and were used variously for storage or as a kind of architectural recess. Alongside it, a second smaller subcircular foundation survives to about 0.8 metres, with a diameter of around 3.7 metres. A third structure, placed directly inside the eastern wall of the enclosure, consists of a circular area approximately 3.87 metres across, now marked mainly by a low bank of collapsed stone between 0.2 and 0.3 metres high. These details were first recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a meticulous regional study that brought dozens of such sites into the scholarly record.

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