Hut site, Glanmore, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Glanmore, Co. Kerry

On the lower slopes of Derryclancy Mountain in Glanmore, a small rectangular outline sits half-swallowed by ferns, its grass-covered walls barely rising above the rough pasture around it.

What makes it worth pausing over is not its size but its deliberateness: somebody once cut this structure into the hillside itself, shaving between ten and forty centimetres into the upslope ground to level a floor and shelter the interior from the prevailing weather. The northwest-facing slope catches the mountain's shadow, and the hut's eastern entrance, just half a metre wide, would have opened onto whatever the working day required.

The structure measures roughly 4.65 metres north to south and 2.3 metres east to west, which is compact even by the standards of seasonal or pastoral shelters. Its walls of earth and stone survive to a height of between 0.3 and 0.7 metres, and a break in the western wall may represent a second opening, or simply a later collapse. There is a second hut site of the same general type just sixteen metres to the southeast, which suggests this was not a solitary refuge but part of something more organised, perhaps a booley settlement where families or herders moved livestock to upland grazing during the summer months, a practice once widespread across Ireland. The two structures together hint at a small community of use, even if neither their date nor their precise function has been firmly established.

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Pete F
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