Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

On a small terrace cut into the rocky slopes below the Slea Head road in Gleann Fán, a low ring of dry-laid stone sits pressed against the eastern side of an old field wall.

It is easy to miss, and that is rather the point. The structure is a hut foundation, roughly circular in plan, its stones stacked without mortar to a surviving height of about a metre and a thickness of one and a half metres. The interior diameter ranges between 3.3 and 3.8 metres, which is small enough to suggest shelter rather than settlement in any permanent sense.

Drystone construction of this kind, where stones are carefully fitted together without any binding material, is among the oldest building techniques in Ireland, and on the Dingle Peninsula it recurs across millennia, from early medieval clochán beehive huts to the seasonal shelters used by those working upland grazing. The position of this example, tucked against a pre-existing field wall on a terrace that breaks the slope, follows a practical logic that would have been obvious to anyone moving livestock or working the hillside. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, a project that documented an extraordinary concentration of monuments across one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in western Europe.

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