Most people who pass them are focused on the climb ahead, and it is easy to walk straight by. But these low rings of stone, barely thirty centimetres high in places, represent something much older than the modern hillwalking tradition that now defines this corner of Kerry.

The two hut sites sit at the head of the Hag's Glen, on the south-eastern flank of Carrauntoohil, Ireland's highest mountain. The first is roughly circular, measuring approximately two metres by 1.8 metres, with walls around 0.8 metres thick; one to two courses of stonework survive, though the upper courses have been rebuilt at some point. Immediately downslope to the north-east lies a second, slightly smaller structure, around 1.8 metres by 1.65 metres, its walls similarly thick but with noticeable collapse on the downslope side. Hut sites of this kind, essentially the stone footprints of simple shelters, are found across upland Ireland, and while their precise dates and uses are often difficult to pin down without excavation, they are generally associated with seasonal activity in the hills, whether pastoral, such as summer grazing, or perhaps connected to the kinds of transient sheltering that high mountain terrain demands. The compressed dimensions here suggest structures built for function rather than comfort, small enough to be raised quickly from local stone and just large enough to provide cover.