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 small oval outline pressed into the rough hill pasture marks a structure that most walkers would pass without a second glance.

It measures just 3.2 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, a space barely large enough for two or three people to shelter. What survives is the collapsed remnant of a drystone wall, built without mortar by laying stones carefully against one another, now reduced to a height of between 0.4 and 0.6 metres and spread to a thickness of around 0.7 metres where it has tumbled and settled. Loose stones lie scattered both inside the interior and down the slope below it, suggesting the original wall was somewhat more substantial before gravity and time worked on it.

The section running roughly west to east is the best preserved, composed of larger stones that have held their position more stubbornly than the rest. The site sits in what is classified as a hut site, a broad and deliberately cautious category used for simple single-roomed structures whose precise date and function are difficult to pin down without excavation. Such sites on Irish uplands could belong to almost any period, from prehistory through to post-medieval transhumance, when farming communities moved livestock to high pastures in summer and built or reused rough shelters for the herders who accompanied them. The south-facing aspect of this particular slope is telling; it would have offered the maximum available warmth and shelter from prevailing winds, a practical consideration that would have mattered equally to an Iron Age shepherd and a seventeenth-century one.

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Pete F
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