Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slopes of the Beennacouma and Mount Eagle ridge in Gleann Fán, two small drystone structures sit conjoined in open mountain terrain, easy to miss and harder still to date.

What makes them worth a second look is how they were built: not as separate buildings set side by side, but as an interlocking pair, one pressing against the other, each making use of whatever the ground offered.

The first structure is roughly circular in plan, with a small niche cut into its western wall, and measures between two and two and a half metres across. It abuts the eastern side of the second, larger structure, which is itself built partly against a natural rock outcrop, using the outcrop's south-eastern face as a ready-made wall. This second chamber has a lintelled entrance, a construction technique in which a horizontal stone is laid across two uprights to form a doorway, oriented towards the east-south-east and measuring just fifty-five centimetres high by eighty centimetres wide, meaning entry would have required crouching low. The walls survive to one metre in thickness and one and three-quarter metres in height. A substantial recess in the south-western wall, measuring one and a half metres across and over a metre deep, may have served as a sleeping platform, a storage niche, or simply an alcove shaped by the available stone. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful stacking and interlocking of stones, was widely used across early Irish and medieval rural sites, and its presence here does not on its own narrow the date. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a landmark survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region that documented hundreds of such features across the peninsula.

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