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, a circle of tumbled stone barely two metres across marks what was once a small dwelling or shelter.

It is easy to miss entirely, and that near-invisibility is part of what makes it worth pausing over. The hut site sits within a wider pattern of relict field boundaries, the ghostly outlines of an agricultural landscape that has long since been abandoned to rough hill pasture, with the valley of the Owbaun River opening out below to the south-west.

The structure itself is modest almost to the point of disappearing. A collapsed drystone wall, built without mortar in the tradition of dry-stone construction, traces a circle roughly 2.2 metres in diameter. The wall survives to only about 15 centimetres in height, though it was originally 70 centimetres thick, suggesting something more substantial than it now appears. What makes the site quietly ingenious is the way it was adapted to the hillside. Rather than levelling the ground beforehand, the builders cut the uphill, eastern portion of the floor to a depth of around 80 centimetres into the slope, while leaving the western portion raised, effectively creating a flat surface on ground that naturally sloped away beneath them. Six metres to the north, a further section of a relict boundary wall runs roughly east-north-east to west-south-west, a remnant of the field system within which this small structure once made sense.

The site sits within a wider landscape of similar traces across Kerry's uplands, where communities once worked marginal ground that was later given back to heather and bog. The Mangerton area is accessible on foot from the lakes of Killarney, though the hut itself lies off any marked path, in rough pasture where such remains blend easily into the surrounding terrain.

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Pete F
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