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 Co. Kerry, two small drystone huts sit joined together on rough mountain terrain, their walls still standing to a height of about one and a half metres despite no mortar ever having held them in place.

These are clocháns, a term for the dry-stone beehive or oval huts found across the Dingle Peninsula and associated with early medieval settlement, though dating individual examples is notoriously difficult. What gives this particular pair a quiet biographical twist is that one of them appears to have had a second life: the circular northern hut, roughly four metres in diameter, was divided internally by a cross-wall, a modification that the archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1899, interpreted as a conversion to use as a turf store. Someone, at some point, looked at an ancient dwelling and decided it would do better as a fuel shed.

The southern hut is oval rather than circular, smaller at three by two and a third metres across, and carries an unusual feature within its own fabric: a small wedge-shaped chamber hollowed out inside the thickness of the south wall, measuring roughly one and a half metres long, three-quarters of a metre wide, and less than half a metre high. Its purpose is not recorded. The northern hut abuts the south-west side of an old field wall, suggesting the site was already part of a farmed or managed landscape when the structures were built, or became so later. Macalister noted that the clochan group had once been enclosed by a perimeter wall, though by the time of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, no definite trace of this enclosure remained. To the east of the northern hut are traces of a third structure of uncertain function, and a little further south, on the other side of the old field wall, a large heap of collapsed stone may represent the remains of yet another hut, though it has not been confirmed as such.

The site sits in genuinely rough mountain terrain, and the landscape around it has clearly been read and re-read across generations, with field walls, collapsed stone, and half-legible foundations layered across the hillside. The small chamber built into the wall of the southern hut is easy to overlook but worth examining closely; at less than half a metre in height, it is too small to be a sleeping space for an adult, leaving its original use an open question.

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