Hut site, Fán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Fán, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, in the rough upland terrain above the Dingle Peninsula, a pair of ancient stone huts lean against each other and against an old field wall, their walls still standing to a height of one and a half metres despite centuries of exposure.

These are clocháns, a term for the drystone corbelled or walled huts associated with early Christian and medieval settlement in the west of Ireland, built without mortar and relying entirely on the careful placement of stone. What makes this particular pair quietly strange is that one of them was evidently repurposed long after its original construction: a cross-wall was inserted inside the circular northern hut, apparently converting it into a turf store. The building itself remained useful, but for an entirely different kind of life.

The site is known locally as Loc or Clochán Cábún. The northern hut is circular, roughly 4.1 metres in diameter, while the southern one is oval in plan and somewhat smaller, measuring around 3 by 2.3 metres. The southern hut has a detail worth noting: a small wedge-shaped chamber, only 1.5 metres long and less than half a metre high, built into the thickness of its southern wall. Such internal recesses are occasionally found in clochán structures, and their purpose, storage or perhaps simply structural economy, is rarely certain. R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1899, noted that the group had once been enclosed by a surrounding wall, though no definite trace of this survives. To the east of the northern hut there are traces of a third structure of uncertain function, and a little further south, a large heap of stone collapse that may represent yet another hut reduced entirely to rubble.

The site sits in genuinely rough mountain terrain, and the accumulated collapses and partial walls around it suggest a small cluster of occupation rather than a single isolated building. The old field wall that the northern hut abuts hints at a landscape that was once more actively managed than it appears today, with boundaries and enclosures now mostly dissolved back into the hillside.

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Pete F
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