Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Mount Eagle, looking out over Dingle Bay, there is a pair of ancient stone huts joined together and largely intact, their drystone walls still standing to well over three metres in places.

Known as Clochán Mór, they belong to a type of early Irish structure built without mortar, using a corbelling technique in which each successive ring of stone projects slightly inward over the one below until the courses meet at the top to form a beehive-shaped roof. What makes this particular example unusual is not just the preservation, but the complexity concealed within the fabric of the walls themselves.

The two circular huts, each roughly five metres across internally, are connected by a lintelled passage at their shared wall, and a break in the masonry roughly midway along that passage makes clear that the huts were built separately rather than conceived as a single unit. The larger of the two, the north-western hut, has its outer wall reinforced for most of its circumference by a buttress of earth and stone, and within that same wall runs an L-shaped lintelled passage, accessible through an opening barely forty centimetres square, which bends through the thickness of the masonry for over five metres in total. A possible ventilation opening sits at ground level off the north wall. The south-eastern hut has two entrances in its eastern arc and several low stones set upright on the interior floor whose purpose remains unexplained. When the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister visited in 1899 he recorded a so-called well inside this hut and the possible remains of a third structure or forecourt outside it; neither feature survives today, and two of the four wall niches he noted in the north-western hut have also since disappeared, suggesting some degree of rebuilding in the intervening century. The nineteenth-century surveyor Du Noyer had earlier described an external staircase ascending the south-western face, though later examination concluded that what he saw were probably protruding construction stones used to give access during the original building work. Among the loose material found at the site was a fragment of a rotary disc quernstone, a hand-powered grinding tool used for processing grain, which hints at the domestic, working character of the place.

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