Hut site, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the southern slopes of Mount Eagle in Co. Kerry, there is a small cashel, a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval type, that has been quietly losing itself to time and practical reuse.
Known as Cathair Bheag na Máirtíneach, it once contained five corbelled stone huts, the kind of drystone beehive structures, built without mortar by carefully overlapping horizontal courses of stone, that appear across the Dingle Peninsula. Today, almost nothing of the original complex survives in anything like its intended form.
When John Windele visited in 1848, he counted five huts inside the cashel. The Ordnance Survey maps, made around the same period, recorded only three. By the time R.A.S. Macalister examined the site in 1899, substantial remains of just one hut were standing, with faint traces of others. That single survivor has had a complicated afterlife. Farmers at some point converted it into a sheep-fold, heightening its western wall, replacing its eastern half with a straight modern wall, and adding an external wall beside the entrance to help funnel animals inside. What was probably an original circular structure roughly 4.5 metres in diameter has been compressed and reshaped into something more functional than ancient. A small lintelled recess in the wall opposite the entrance, measuring around 32 centimetres wide and 40 centimetres deep, is still visible; a second recess that Macalister noted has since disappeared. Beneath the present outer face, a basal mound suggests that an even earlier wall may lie underneath, though it is possible that the entire outer face visible today is a later rebuild. To the east of the surviving hut, field clearance debris now covers the area where Macalister identified traces of a second clochaun, the Irish term for these corbelled stone cells, but the connecting passage between the two structures can still be made out.