Hut site, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slope of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, a circle of tumbled stone barely two metres across sits in rough hill pasture, easy to step over and easier still to miss entirely.

It is the collapsed remains of a drystone hut, its wall now reduced to a low, ragged ring roughly sixty-five centimetres thick and forty centimetres high, with loose stones scattered both inside and around it. The dimensions alone suggest something modest even in its working life, more a temporary shelter than a permanent dwelling.

Drystone construction, in which stones are stacked without mortar and rely on their own weight and careful placement to hold together, was used across Ireland for field walls, enclosures, and small shelters from prehistoric times well into the post-medieval period. A site this size on open mountain ground is likely associated with seasonal pastoral activity, the kind of temporary upland occupation that accompanied the movement of livestock to higher ground in summer months. Reinforcing that reading is a relict field boundary that adjoins the hut site to the north-west, the boundary and the hut apparently belonging to the same episode of land use, now both abandoned and partially collapsed back into the hillside.

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Pete F
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