Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-facing slope above the Glanfahan river valley on the Dingle Peninsula, a small stone building known as Clochán Dubh still stands to a height of 3.5 metres, its corbelled walls almost entirely intact.
Corbelled construction is one of the oldest building techniques in Ireland: rather than using mortar, builders laid successive rings of flat stones, each projecting slightly inward over the one below, until the courses met at the top to form a self-supporting dome. The doorway, positioned to the south-east, is carefully formed with a lintel stone and measures 1.55 metres high by 0.55 metres wide. What makes the approach especially unusual is a sunken external passageway, nearly four metres long and almost a metre deep, that leads up to the entrance from outside, giving the threshold an almost ceremonial quality.
Below the inner wall at the south side, a second lintelled opening sits at ground level, just over half a metre square, and appears to extend at least 1.25 metres into the wall. It may connect to a souterrain discovered roughly three metres to the south of the hut, recorded by a researcher named Curran as find number 54, at the beginning of the twentieth century. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement and thought to have served for storage or refuge. The hut itself is sometimes called a clochán, a term for these drystone, beehive-shaped dwellings found particularly along the western Irish seaboard. A second, smaller structure once stood about 6.65 metres to the east-south-east, but it has been absorbed into a field wall and buried under clearance debris, its surviving height reduced to just 1.1 metres. A possible bullaun stone, a natural or worked boulder bearing a deliberately hollowed depression, lies a short distance to the north-west; its bowl-shaped hollow measures roughly 24 centimetres by 13 centimetres. Bullaun stones appear across early Christian Ireland and are often found near ecclesiastical or ritual sites, though their precise function remains debated. The cluster of features here, the clochán, the probable souterrain, the second hut, and the bullaun, suggests this was not an isolated structure but part of a small, purposeful settlement on the Kerry hillside.