Hut site, Derrynafinnia, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Derrynafinnia, Co. Kerry

On the south-east-facing slopes of The East Pap of Dana, one of the twin peaks in the Paps of Dana mountain range in Kerry, a small circular hut sits largely swallowed by heather and rubble.

It measures just 2.2 metres east to west and 2 metres north to south, its defining stone wall now reduced to a low, vegetation-covered ring no more than 0.3 metres high. What gives the structure a quiet engineering interest is the way whoever built it dealt with the hillslope: the south-east portion of the interior floor was raised by around 0.4 metres, while the north-west side was cut roughly 0.2 metres into the upslope, levelling the living space against the gradient of the hill.

The hut does not stand alone. Two further hut sites lie close by, one approximately 15 metres to the east and another around 10 metres to the south, and a relict field wall survives roughly 70 metres to the east. A relict field wall is essentially the remains of an old boundary or enclosure wall, long since abandoned and no longer maintained, which has gradually merged back into the landscape. Taken together, the cluster points to a small community of some kind, people who worked this upland ground, divided it, and sheltered on it. The Paps of Dana, known in Irish tradition as the breasts of the goddess Anu, have long drawn attention for the Bronze Age cairns at their summits, but the quieter evidence of habitation on the lower slopes tends to pass unnoticed. Whether these huts date to the same broad prehistoric period, to early medieval pastoralism, or to the post-medieval practice of booleying, where families moved livestock to high summer pastures, is not recorded here, and the heather-covered rubble obscuring the interior has not yet given up much of the detail.

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Pete F
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