Hut site, Mangerton, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the slopes of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, the bog has preserved something easy to miss: the footprint of a circular stone hut, barely two and a half metres across, its collapsed drystone walls still visible where the base stones push up through the peat.
Drystone construction uses no mortar, relying instead on the careful fitting of stones, and what survives here is modest but legible. The wall, originally around eighty centimetres thick and now standing only thirty centimetres high, has its base stones set at right angles to the wall's line, a detail that suggests deliberate construction rather than casual piling.
The hut does not sit in isolation. It occupies the north-eastern corner of a larger enclosure, with its northern wall butting directly against the enclosure's inner face, which implies the two structures were conceived together or at least in relation to one another. To the west, the hut's arc meets a second hut site. A third lies roughly twenty-eight metres to the south-east, and the remnant of an old field boundary runs about eighty metres further in the same direction. Taken together, these features suggest a small agricultural settlement, perhaps a seasonal or upland farming cluster, of the kind that once dotted the higher ground across Munster. The bog that now covers much of the site has, ironically, helped to preserve what might otherwise have been robbed for later building stone or simply eroded away.