Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-facing slope above the Glanfahan river valley in Kerry, a small stone building called Clochán Dubh, the Dark Hut, survives in near-complete form after what must be well over a thousand years.
What makes it quietly arresting is how much of the original structure remains: the corbelled drystone walls, built without mortar by stacking and angling flat stones inward until they close overhead, still reach 3.5 metres in height across a circular interior five metres across. A sunken passageway, nearly four metres long and cut almost a metre into the ground, approaches the lintelled doorway from the south-east, so that anyone entering would have had to move downward before stepping up through a gap just 55 centimetres wide. Whether that arrangement served a practical purpose, a ritual one, or simply reflects the natural slope of the ground is not recorded.
The building belongs to a type found widely across the Dingle Peninsula, where early Christian hermits and monastic communities favoured corbelled stone cells, known in Irish as clocháin, as a form of permanent but portable-feeling shelter. This particular example was noted and catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the peninsula. At the inner wall face on the south side, at ground level, there is a small lintelled aperture, roughly half a metre square and at least 1.25 metres deep, which may connect to a souterrain discovered about three metres south of the hut at the beginning of the twentieth century. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or concealment. A short distance to the north-west of the hut sits a possible bullaun stone, a boulder with a deliberate cup-shaped depression worn or carved into its upper surface. Such stones are found throughout early medieval Ireland, often near ecclesiastical sites, though their exact function remains debated. A second hut once stood roughly six and a half metres to the east-south-east, but it has been absorbed into a field wall and is now largely buried under generations of field clearance debris, its walls reduced to little more than a metre in height.