Hut site, Garranebane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Garranebane, Co. Kerry

On the lower western slopes of Bentee, in the boggy pasture of Garranebane, there is a site that appears on Ordnance Survey maps but no longer exists in any physical form.

Both editions of the OS maps marked a cloghaun here, the Irish term for a small dry-stone beehive hut of the kind built without mortar, with corbelled walls that curve inward to form a domed roof. Whatever once stood in this poorly drained ground has since vanished entirely, leaving only a cartographic ghost.

The site is recorded under the variant spellings Cloghaun and Clochán, reflecting the fluidity with which placename forms were transcribed during the nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland. Clochán-type structures are associated with early medieval monastic and pastoral life, particularly in Kerry and along the Atlantic seaboard, where the tradition of dry-stone corbelling persisted long after it had disappeared elsewhere. The Iveragh Peninsula, on which Garranebane sits, contains numerous such remains, though not all have survived above ground. In this case, the boggy, waterlogged character of the ground on Bentee's lower slopes may well have hastened the disappearance of whatever structure once stood there, whether through gradual subsidence, stone robbing, or simply the slow reclamation of the land by wet ground.

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