Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-facing slope just east of Slea Head, in the rough pastureland of Gleann Fán, two small stone huts sit conjoined and largely forgotten.
What makes them quietly odd is their arrangement: not a single structure, not two entirely separate ones, but a pair connected by a passage, each retaining its own entrance facing south-east. The larger of the two measured around four metres in diameter, the smaller about two and a half metres, and the surviving walls stand no higher than eighty centimetres. It is the kind of site that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance.
The huts belong to a category of early settlement remains found throughout the Dingle Peninsula, where the density of prehistoric and early medieval archaeology is unusually high. Their precise date is uncertain, though conjoined or clustered hut sites of this form are generally associated with early agricultural or pastoral occupation, when small communities or extended family groups built in stone what elsewhere might have been constructed in timber or turf. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a landmark study of the Dingle Peninsula that catalogued hundreds of monuments across one of the most archaeologically complex landscapes in Ireland. At the time of recording, the remains were already poorly preserved, their stonework low and scattered into the surrounding grassland.