Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle in County Kerry, three small stone structures sit in rough pasture, easy to overlook and easier still to misread as natural features of the hillside.
One of them, however, is still largely intact: a circular hut just 2.2 metres in diameter and 1.6 metres high, built using corbelled drystone construction, a technique in which flat stones are laid in overlapping rings that gradually close toward the top, requiring no mortar and no timber. Inside, a small niche is set into the north wall, the kind of recessed pocket that might have held a lamp or a few personal objects. An entrance opens to the south-east. The other two structures in the group have fared less well; both are now little more than depressions in the ground, one circular and roughly 2 metres across, the other oval, measuring approximately 3.5 by 2.5 metres, with its entrance placed to the south-west.
Sites of this kind are scattered across the Dingle Peninsula, part of a broader landscape of early settlement that includes field systems, souterrains, standing stones, and promontory forts. Gleann Fán, the valley in which this group sits, lies in the Corca Dhuibhne region, an area that has been the subject of sustained archaeological attention, most notably through J. Cuppage's 1986 survey of the peninsula, which recorded this cluster as part of a wider inventory of surviving structures. The corbelled hut is the most legible of the three; the depression immediately to its north and the oval hollow beyond it give only a faint impression of what was once a small but deliberate grouping of buildings, the exact date and purpose of which remain unspecified in the record.