Hut site, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

On the south-western slope of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, someone once cut a small circle into the hillside and built a low drystone wall around it, creating a shelter just two metres across.

The east side of the interior was dug roughly sixty centimetres into the upslope, a practical trick to level out the floor against the natural gradient of the terrain. What remains today is a collapsed but legible ring of stone, with the western and north-western sections of the wall in the best condition, and a stretch along the southern arc where upright stones were set on their edges longitudinally to form the inner face.

What makes this small structure quietly interesting is not the structure itself but its context. It sits on a terrace near the southern bank of the Owbaun River, in rough hill pasture, and it does not sit alone. A relict field boundary wall passes immediately to the north, a remnant of what was once a wider network of enclosures on this part of the mountain. Twenty-six metres further north lies another hut site, and forty-three metres beyond that stand two conjoined huts, their walls merging in a way that suggests sequential building or shared use. Together they point to a period when this exposed, rain-swept hillside supported some form of organised habitation or seasonal land use, perhaps connected to transhumance, the practice of moving livestock to upland grazing during summer months, which left scattered traces like these across many Irish mountain landscapes.

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Pete F
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