Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

On the lower southern slopes of Mount Eagle in Gleann Fán, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely the point.

What survives is the ghost of a circular drystone hut, a structure built without mortar, its stones laid and shaped by hand, now reduced to a rough ring of tumbled masonry roughly five metres across and just over a metre high at its tallest point. It is the kind of remain that rewards patience and a certain tolerance for ambiguity, where the imagination has to supply most of what time has taken away.

Drystone huts of this type are scattered across the Dingle Peninsula, part of a dense archaeological landscape that has accumulated over several thousand years. Mount Eagle sits at the western edge of the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula, a region whose Irish name refers to the ancient tribal territory of the Corcu Duibhne, and the slopes running down from it preserve traces of settlement from various periods, though in many cases the surviving fabric is too eroded to allow confident dating. The site at Gleann Fán was recorded as part of a systematic archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula published in 1986, which catalogued the extraordinary concentration of monuments in this part of Kerry, from promontory forts and souterrains to field systems and early ecclesiastical enclosures. At five metres in diameter, this hut would have been a modest structure, functional rather than ceremonial, its drystone walls once likely corbelled or thatched overhead.

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