Hut site, Currach Gráige, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Currach Gráige, Co. Kerry

On the lower slopes of Ballydavid Head in County Kerry, the remains of a small early settlement have largely dissolved back into the hillside.

What survives is a confusion of collapsed stone, and yet within that confusion, if you look carefully, the logic of a community's domestic arrangement begins to reassert itself. Three hut-sites once stood here, enclosed within a cashel, which is a type of early Irish stone ringfort, its circular or oval enclosing wall providing both a boundary and a degree of shelter for the people and possibly the livestock within.

The site sits above Smerwick Harbour and the flat plain through which the Feohanagh river drains, a position that would have offered both outlook and access to productive lowland. The enclosing wall is now most legible along the western perimeter, where a low bank of small stones retains occasional stretches of original facing. Three hut-sites can be traced abutting the inner edge of that wall, a common arrangement in cashel settlements, where structures were built against the enclosure to make use of it as a shared rear wall. The largest of the three is circular, with an internal diameter of roughly five metres, placing it within the modest but functional range typical of early medieval domestic buildings in this part of Ireland. The other two are less clearly defined, their outlines absorbed into the general scatter. The site was recorded and described by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a foundational document for understanding the dense concentration of early monuments across the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula.

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Pete F
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