House - vernacular house, Glanmane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
On a levelled terrace cut into a steep east-facing slope above Tralee Bay, a rectangular ruin sits on top of an older, rounder one.
That layering is what makes this site at Glanmane quietly compelling: two separate phases of occupation, one built directly over the other, preserving in stone the habit of people returning to the same patch of upland ground across what may have been a considerable span of time.
The earlier structure is a sub-circular hut site, roughly 3.2 metres across, with what appears to be a narrow entrance on its southern side. At some later point, a much larger rectangular house was constructed on the same spot, its western wall partially overlapping the older hut's western wall and its western end dug back into the slope for stability. The later building measures about 7.8 metres long and 2.8 metres wide internally, with walls still standing to around 0.9 metres in places and nearly a metre thick. A small internal division, set roughly 2 metres from the western end, hints at a partitioned interior, perhaps separating a living area from a byre or a store. No obvious entrance survives in the standing remains. The land around it is rough upland grazing for sheep, much as it presumably was during the building's working life.
Vernacular houses of this kind, built from local stone without mortar and shaped by the practicalities of slope, weather, and available materials, are scattered across the uplands of Kerry, but the double-phase nature of this example gives it particular interest. The deliberate reuse of an earlier hut site suggests the terrace was recognised across generations as a useful place: sheltered enough, level enough, with a long eastward view over the bay below.