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 small circular structure sits largely unnoticed in rough hill pasture.

It measures just 2.2 metres in diameter, its drystone wall, built without mortar by fitting stones carefully against one another, now collapsed to a height of roughly 0.3 metres. An opening about a metre wide faces south-east, and loose stones lie scattered across the interior. It is easy to walk past without registering what it is.

The site is set within unenclosed commonage, the kind of open upland ground that was historically shared grazing land, and it sits inside a broader network of relict field boundaries, the ghostly outlines of an earlier agricultural landscape that once organised this hillside into worked plots. A fragment of that same field wall system meets the hut site at its northern edge, suggesting the structure was part of a functioning, if modest, way of life up here rather than an isolated anomaly. A second hut site of similar character lies immediately to the east, hinting that this was at some point a small cluster of activity rather than a solitary shelter. Structures like these are generally associated with seasonal upland use, the practice of moving livestock to higher ground in summer, known in Ireland as booley farming or transhumance, though the precise date and context of this particular example are not recorded.

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Pete F
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