Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Two small huts sit side by side in a relatively rock-free field just above the Slea Head road in Gleann Fán, on the Dingle Peninsula.
What makes them worth pausing over is not their size but their arrangement: the pair are conjoined, sharing a common wall or boundary, yet there is no connecting passage between them. Whoever built and used these structures moved between them only by going outside.
The eastern hut is roughly D-shaped, with a diameter of around 2.5 metres, surviving walls still standing to about 1.4 metres in height and approximately 1.1 metres thick. Its neighbour to the west is lower and less legible as a standing structure; it survives mainly as a depression in the ground, lined with large slabs, with a maximum height of only 0.6 metres. The dimensions, the dry-stone construction technique implied by the surviving fabric, and the general form place these firmly within the tradition of early stone hut sites found across the Dingle Peninsula, a landscape dense with the remains of early medieval and prehistoric settlement. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the peninsula, a foundational reference for anyone trying to make sense of what this part of Kerry actually contains beneath its surface.