Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of Beennacouma, in the rough and rocky terrain of Gleann Fán, the remains of two small circular huts survive in a state that demands a certain imaginative effort from anyone who finds them.
The walls stand to less than a metre in height, and the ground plans, measuring roughly 3.5 metres and 2.8 metres across, are barely legible in the landscape. Yet the site carries a name, Clochán an Eidhne, that suggests it was once known and remembered locally long before any archaeologist arrived to record it.
The structures are clocháns, a term for the dry-stone circular or beehive-shaped huts found across the west of Ireland, built without mortar by laying flat stones in courses that gradually corbel inward to form a roof. This pair were probably conjoined, sharing a wall or an entrance arrangement, a configuration seen at other early habitation and monastic sites along the Dingle Peninsula. The site was documented by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986, a systematic effort to catalogue the extraordinary density of prehistoric and early medieval remains across this part of Kerry. Whether the huts served a domestic, agricultural, or religious purpose is not recorded, and in their current condition they offer few clues beyond their form and their placement on a south-facing slope, which would have offered some shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather.