Hut site, Fán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Fán, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, on a level terrace above the Dingle Peninsula, sits a structure that has quietly served two very different purposes across the centuries.

Its original builders shaped it as a D-shaped corbelled hut, a type of drystone construction in which courses of flat stones are laid so that each layer projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing to form a roof without mortar or timber. At some later point, someone with sheep and a pragmatic eye decided the ancient walls were perfectly serviceable as a fold, and adapted the building accordingly. The result is a place layered with use, its original form still legible beneath the modifications.

The structure's entrance gap sits at the northern end of its straight eastern wall, and opens into a short approach passage defined on one side by upright slabs. To the north of this passage lie the heavily ruined remains of a second, apparently circular structure, recorded with an internal diameter of around 1.67 metres, and noted by Macalister as early as 1899. Abutting the south-eastern side of the D-shaped hut is a small enclosure, almost certainly connected to its later life as a sheep-fold rather than to whatever domestic or ecclesiastical purpose it originally served. The site was catalogued in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which brought together a remarkable density of early remains from this corner of Kerry, a landscape that has preserved such structures unusually well.

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Pete F
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