Hut site, Fustane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Fustane, Co. Kerry

On the southern slope of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, a ring of collapsed stone barely breaks the surface of the bog.

It is easy to walk past without registering it as anything deliberate, yet this low, roughly circular arrangement of tumbled drystone wall, just three metres across, represents the footprint of a structure in which someone once lived or sheltered.

The remains consist of a collapsed drystone wall, a type of construction using stacked unmortered stone, that still protrudes between thirty and fifty centimetres above the surrounding bog surface, with a thickness of around sixty centimetres. A gap in the wall at the south-east marks what was likely an original entrance or doorway. The circular form and modest diameter are consistent with a simple hut site of the kind found across upland Ireland, associated variously with seasonal grazing activity, early medieval settlement, or even earlier occupation. The bog, which has grown around and partially over the structure, has in some ways preserved it, holding the collapsed stones more or less in place while the surrounding landscape has continued to change.

The site sits in rough hill pasture on a south-facing slope, which would have offered some shelter from prevailing winds and reasonable exposure to whatever warmth the Kerry uplands provide. It is an unassuming remnant, measuring its significance not in scale but in the quiet fact of its survival on a mountainside where such things are easily lost to erosion, encroaching vegetation, and the slow work of time.

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Pete F
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