Midden, Baile An Reannaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a small promontory pushing northwards into Smerwick Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula, somewhere between the beaches of Trá an Fhíona and Béal Bán, there was once something worth noticing underfoot: mounds of shells, the accumulated refuse of people eating shellfish, piled up over what may have been generations.
That kind of deposit is known as a midden, and it is one of the more direct forms of archaeological evidence a site can offer, a record not of monuments or ambitions but of meals.
By the time the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey recorded the site in 1986, those shell mounds had already given way to a large sand-dune. The shells themselves, and whatever else might have been buried among them, including animal bones, hearth ash, or small artefacts, had either been displaced or simply swallowed by the shifting coastal landscape. The promontory at Baile an Reannaigh sits in a stretch of coastline that has always been subject to that kind of slow transformation, where wind-blown sand and tidal action gradually obscure what earlier inhabitants left behind.
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