Hut site, Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower southern slopes of Mount Eagle, on the Dingle Peninsula, two ancient stone huts sit joined together against an old field wall, now so buried under generations of cleared fieldstone that they are barely legible as structures at all.
What remains, once you know what to look for, is a pair of conjoined huts built using corbelled drystone construction, a technique in which stones are laid in gradually overlapping courses to form a self-supporting roof without mortar. The method is ancient and was used across early medieval Ireland, producing the beehive-shaped structures known as clocháns that are characteristic of this part of Kerry.
When the antiquarian George Victor Du Noyer visited and recorded the site in 1858, the huts were considerably more legible. He described one as circular in plan and the other as D-shaped, the two connected by a lintelled communicating passage, with a separate entrance to the outside leading from the circular hut. The circular hut measured roughly 5.5 metres across; the D-shaped companion approximately 5.5 by 4.26 metres. By the time R. A. S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, he counted three huts rather than two, raising the possibility that a third structure had been identified, or that one had become more visible, or that the two scholars were simply reading the same rubble differently. The gap between those two accounts, separated by just over four decades, already hints at how quickly such structures can change in appearance as farmland management shifts the debris around them.