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 small stone structure that has quietly served two very different purposes across its long existence.

It is D-shaped in plan, built using corbelling, a technique in which courses of drystone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing the roof without mortar or timber. Whoever originally built it was working within a tradition that stretches back through early medieval and prehistoric Ireland, producing structures of considerable sophistication from nothing more than stacked stone. What makes this particular example quietly telling is that at some later point it was simply pressed into service as a sheep-fold, a fate that altered it and, in doing so, preserved it.

The structural details are modest but interesting. The entrance gap sits at the northern end of the straight eastern wall and is approached through a short external passage, its southern side defined by upright slabs. To the north of that passage lie the very ruined remains of a second structure, apparently circular and with an internal diameter of roughly 1.67 metres, as recorded by Macalister in 1899. The two buildings may have been related in their original use, though the second is now too fragmentary to say much with confidence. Abutting the south-eastern side of the D-shaped hut is a small enclosure that almost certainly belongs to the later phase of the site, when sheep rather than people were its primary concern. The Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, published by J. Cuppage in 1986, provides the fullest account of the site and sets it within a landscape exceptionally dense with early remains.

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